Download MDAW15--Real ID Aff_Gendernormativity Version

MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
1
REAL ID Gender Normativity
REAL ID Gender ................................................................................................................................................................ 1
Strategery ..................................................................................................................................................................... 2
1AC ................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Sheet One – Gender Normativity.............................................................................................................................. 4
Sheet Two: Solvency ............................................................................................................................................... 9
1AC – Short ................................................................................................................................................................ 11
Contention ( ): Gender Normativity ...................................................................................................................... 12
Gender Normativity Impacts ........................................................................................................................................ 17
K of DAs – Future bad 2AC .................................................................................................................................... 19
Future K - Extensions ............................................................................................................................................. 20
A/T: Kritiks - Perm .................................................................................................................................................. 22
A/T: Kritiks – Open Normativities ............................................................................................................................ 23
Gender normativity harms ext. .................................................................................................................................... 25
Harms – Gender Neutral IDs .................................................................................................................................. 28
Harms – Detention ................................................................................................................................................. 29
Asylum– adverse credibility ......................................................................................................................................... 31
Adverse credibility .................................................................................................................................................. 32
Privacy ................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Solvency ..................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Solvency – Queer/LGBT Agenda ........................................................................................................................... 35
Solvency - Gender Neutral IDs .............................................................................................................................. 37
Solvency – Testimony burdens .............................................................................................................................. 38
Topicality .................................................................................................................................................................... 39
T- Substantial ......................................................................................................................................................... 40
T – Its ..................................................................................................................................................................... 41
T – Surveillance ..................................................................................................................................................... 42
Neg ............................................................................................................................................................................. 43
Legalism K Link...................................................................................................................................................... 44
Cap K Link ............................................................................................................................................................. 46
Homonationalism Link ............................................................................................................................................ 47
K Alt – Abolition...................................................................................................................................................... 48
Alt Causes ............................................................................................................................................................. 49
States CP Solvency ............................................................................................................................................... 51
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
2
Strategery
Herein includes both an “advantage” version of the gender normativity advantage on Real ID and a full critical 1AC. Plan
texts are different. The critical version says USFG because it wants, for the most part, to avoid the supreme court
commerce clause debates, although in some circumstances it may be strategic to specify actor in order to have 2AC add
on possibilities. Up to you.
The Real ID act, passed in 2005, calls on states to produce IDs fitting national standards. It also does a bunch of stuff with
immigration – significantly it lowers the burden for rejecting asylum claims where there is inconsistency in testimony (here,
LGBTQ people escaping from repressive regimes are disproportionately affected). It is arguable whether the ASYLUM
part of the Real ID act would be topical ground. I’ve included cards on this but be careful not to read them unless you
amend plan text to include the adverse credibility standards.
The critical advantage gives you access to the futurity K, with which you can use to answer disads. The argument is that
fears for the future impose rigidity and identity policing on the present, e.g the same stuff that Ajana talks about as
genocidal. You don’t link to this because the Shotwell solvency card is pretty good on situating the plan in an “open
normativity” that emphasizes the capacity for people to flourish in the present rather than calculating against future harms.
In answering critiques of the law and the state (and explaining your plan’s solvency), you want to emphasize that the Plan
advocacy occurs within a multi-leveled process that doesn’t simply consider “post-plan” implications. Rather, rallying
around the repeal of Real ID has implications for (1) the LGBTQIA movement, in diverting it away from the
homonationalist status quo (see the Olson cards – remember, you control uniqueness on homonationalism e.g. gay
marriage) and (2) the orientation of the State – Shotwell says that plan institutes new norms of statecraft. You want to win
that counternorms are key and that it is not enough to abolish. Focusing on Real ID NOW as a way of reorienting of the
present “gay agenda” is what is key. It’s a link and perm debate – and I think you can argue well that repeal is abolition
and not the legalism the Link evidence talks about.
Negs
Legalism K links are pretty good here. Even if they don’t institute new law they put all the focus on the legal mandates
rather than the broader social field and, not to mention, the Prison Industrial Complex in which the war against people of
color and queers is being waged. Abolitionism counters the AFF’s investment in the law. You want to press the AFF as to
why they focus on Real ID and not all this other stuff, including non-topical aspects of the Real ID law itself –e.g. asylum
applications and anti-immigration walls which equally place people in prison.
Otherwise, EO C/P is viable. So’s politics, etc. Even if you don’t go for the K, it is worth reading the cards on case.
Have fun.
T
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
3
1AC
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
4
Sheet One – Gender Normativity
Real ID criminalizes gender nonconformity - lands transgender immigrants in
detention centers indefinitely
Turney ’11 (CT, Comments Editor @ UCLA, “Give me your Tired, your Poor, your
Queer,” Law Review 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, Lexis Nexis)¶
The REAL ID Act will likely provide unnecessary administrative burdens on government and intrude on individual privacy.
Pursuant to the REAL ID Act, "states will be required to make electronic copies of all documents available in a national
database to an undefined group of people, including law enforcement officials, for at least 10 years." n64 Further, as
stated above, each city, state, and federal agency has a different requirement for changing one's gender marker on an
identification card. n65 Some agencies require proof of extremely expensive, rare, and often unattainable genital
surgeries before they will change a person's gender marker. n66 Finally, because the REAL ID Act requires
that identification [*330] has a gender marker, it could have the effect of foreclosing all
advocacy attempts to abolish gender markers and eliminate the complications that
transgender people currently have with identification. n67
The recently enacted regulations do not set forth a policy for changing one's gender on their REAL ID, and on the surface
it seems that the federal government will defer to the individual state procedures for changing a gender marker. n68 It is
unclear how the central information system database, apparently intended to be shared
and accessible to an "undefined group of people," will stay coordinated as individual
records are changed. As with Social Security records and state driver's licenses, it is not uncommon that
transgender immigrants have mismatches in identification across multiple databases, mismatches which could be
perceived as "fraudulent." As the American Civil Liberties Union ("ACLU") explained in its REAL ID Regulation
"Scorecard," the regulations are inconclusive with regards to how they will affect transgender people. n69 ¶ Although the
regulations' requirement that identity documents include a gender designation remains problematic, the regulations do not
interfere with the purview of states to issue gender identity-appropriate documents to transgender individuals. However,
the final regulations fail to ensure the security of personal data, which is of particular
concern to transgender individuals given that the disclosure of such data may subject
them to harassment and other forms of discrimination . n70 The reliance on surveillance through
identification in this so-called "age of terror" is already so inaccurate and wrought with problems that the implementation of
the REAL ID Act can only lead to disastrous and discriminatory impacts for low-income
transgender immigrants. n71 It is likely that any "criminal violations" associated with a REAL ID, one's failure to
have a REAL ID, or being deemed "fraudulent" according to one's REAL ID, will result in acts
that are designated as "crimes of moral turpitude" pursuant to immigration law. This, in
turn, will work to speed up the process of criminalization, detention, and eventually,
deportation for transgender immigrants.
Detention increases queer immigrants’ vulnerability to violence and sexual
assault
Turney ’11 (CT, Comments Editor @ UCLA, “Give me your Tired, your Poor, your
Queer,” Law Review 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, Lexis Nexis)¶
Aside from being affected by changing policies regarding who must be detained, once
LGBTQ people are in
detention they face specific issues beyond the typical loss of liberty associated with imprisonment. These include
increased risk of violence for all LGBTQ prisoners and particular health needs for transgender prisoners. In the
criminal detention context, the fact that LGBTQ prisoners face specific hardships is well established. n95 While there is
little completed scholarly work or research in the immigration detention context, what has been done supports the notion
that LGBTQ detainees face many of the same issues. n96 This is further bolstered by the fact that nearly
two-thirds of all detainees are held in local jail facilities, and therefore under the same
conditions as those in a criminal detention context. n97¶ [*1360] ¶ 1. Increased Risks of Violence for
LGBTQ Detainees¶ ¶ In the contexts of incarceration and detention, LGBTQ individuals face
higher levels of violence and sexual violence than most non-LGBTQ prisoners. Two of the
highest-risk groups are male-bodied gender nonconforming prisoners and male-to-female (M-T-F)
transgender prisoners. n98 M-T-F transgender detainees are at especially high risk for abuse due to
prison housing policies. Most prison and detention facilities house detainees according to their assigned sex at
birth and external genitalia, n99 a practice which often literally results in women being detained in men's facilities. n100 ¶ A
study of sexual violence in California prisons released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
5
found that 67
percent of LGBTQ inmates reported being sexually assaulted, a rate fifteen
times higher than the overall population. n101 A 2007 study from the University of California, Irvine, found
that 59 percent of transgender inmates reported being sexually assaulted, a rate thirteen times higher than the overall
population. n102¶ There is some evidence that the numbers in California prisons may be higher than those nationwide, as
California prisons have been shown to have much higher overall rates of sexual assault than other states. n103 While this
indicates that national rates of violence in overall prison populations are lower [*1361] than those found in the California
studies, it does not necessarily indicate that LGBTQ prisoners' proportional risk of violence is lower nationwide. Indeed,
Just Detention International (JDI), a human rights organization that works to end sexual abuse in all forms of
imprisonment, reports that roughly one in five survivors who contact JDI each year self-identify as LGBTQ. n104¶ As
noted above, there is less research about violence towards LGBTQ detainees in the immigration context. The
bureaucratic and insular nature of immigration detention facilities makes it difficult for researchers to conduct empirical
research to determine the precise incidence of violence in detention centers, or the degree to which LGBTQ people
experience violence. n105 However, based on lawsuits and anecdotes, researchers know that problems of violence and
sexual violence do exist in immigration detention. n106¶ In addition to facing similar risks of violence that prisoners in
criminal detention contexts face, immigrant detainees often struggle with significant obstacles to
reporting acts of violence and to obtaining protection from their attackers beyond the
difficulties typical to detention and prison environments . These obstacles include language barriers,
n107 a pervasive lack of access to legal representation, n108 the unresponsive nature of detention bureaucracy, n109
and the substantial power imbalance between detainees - desperate to stay in the United States - and the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) - which not only operates the detention through ICE, but also holds detainees' fates in its hands
through ICE and the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the department that makes admission and deportation
decisions.
Real ID generalizes the crisis of gender nonconformity beyond trans identified
bodies – the policing of gender dovetails U.S. white supremacy and militaristic
imperialism
Beauchamp ‘9 (Tony, Gender and Woman Studies @ UC Davis, “Artful Surveillance
and Strategic Visibility: Transgender bodies and the US state of surveillance after 9/11,”
Surveillance and Society 6.4, 359-360)
The no-match policy aims to locate undocumented immigrants (and potential terrorists) employed under false identities,
yet casts a much broader net. Because conflicting legal regulations often prevent trans people from obtaining consistent
gender markers across all of their identity documents, gender- nonconforming individuals are disproportionately affected
by the policy, whether they are undocumented immigrants or not. The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)
website notes that the organization “receives calls regularly from transgender people across the country who have been
‘outed’ to their employers by the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) unfair gender ‘no-match’ employment letter
policy” (National Center for Transgender Equality 2007). Documents always contain traces of the past,
and we might argue that this has never been as true as it is in our contemporary moment. Dean Spade’s work and other
¶
activist projects have pushed for changes in particular states’ approaches to gendered
identity documents and moved away from the pathologizing of trans identities and bodies.
But such changes emerge within a broader context of U.S. nationalism and the War on
Terror that serves to justify ever-closer scrutiny of travel, identity documents and bodies.¶
It is in this cultural landscape of intensified medical, legal and social surveillance that the DHS Advisory appears. By
warning security personnel of the gendered disguises that terrorists may appear in, the Advisory neatly fuses the threat of
terrorism-in-disguise with perceived gender transgression, marking particular bodies as deceptive and treacherous. Three
days after the Advisory was released, a New York Times article described the Pentagon’s recent screening of the classic
1965 film The Battle of Algiers. The Times article suggests that the Pentagon screening was in part to gain tactical insight
into the current U.S. war in Iraq. Algiers is a film filled with depictions of guerrilla warfare tactics, including those that rely
on the links between gender and national identities: Algerian women pass as French to deliver bombs into French civilian
settings, while Algerian men attempt to pass as women in hijabs, their disguises broken when French soldiers spy their
combat boots. Though neither the DHS Advisory nor the Pentagon’s study of the film explicitly reference transgender
populations, both nevertheless invoke the ties between gender presentation, national identity and bodies marked as
dangerously deceptive.¶ That the Advisory does not specifically name transgender populations in its text does not make it
any less relevant to those populations. The focus on non-normative gender does raise questions
about how this framing of state security affects transgender-identified people. But it also
raises questions about how state institutions might view non-normative gender
presentation as an act not limited to – perhaps not even primarily associated with – transgender
identities. In the context of current security rhetoric related to the War on Terror, transgender individuals may not be
the primary target of such advisories, particularly if those individuals are conforming to normative racial, class and national
presentations. Medical science purports to normalize unruly transgender bodies through surgery and hormones. These
interventions are intended to eliminate any signs of deviant gendering, creating a non-threatening body that is
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
6
undetectable as trans in any way. Transgender bodies that conform to a dominant standard of dress and behavior may be
legible to the state not as transgender at all, but instead as properly gendered and “safe.” ¶ But not all gendered bodies are
so easily normalized. Dominant notions of what constitutes proper feminine or masculine
behavior are grounded in ideals of whiteness, class privilege and compulsory
heterosexuality, and individuals might be read as non-conforming depending on particular
racial, cultural, economic or religious expressions of gender, without ever being classified
as transgender. For example, Siobhan Somerville historicizes the ways that black people have been
medically and culturally understood to have racialized physical characteristics that
directly connect to their perceived abnormality in terms of gender and sexuality. She traces
this history back to the public displays in the mid-1800s of Saartje Baartman, an African woman popularly known as the
Hottentot Venus, whose womanhood was deemed abnormal precisely through racialized readings of her genitalia
(Somerville 2000: 26). In early 20th century all-girl schools, she notes, “the imposition of racial segregation marked the
‘white’ and ‘colored’ girls as differently gendered, even in the space of a supposedly single-sex institution” (35). Somerville
argues that legal cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson advanced racial segregation by inciting panic about the supposed
sexual danger white women experienced at the hands of black men (35). Similar sexual panic served to justify
public lynchings of black men throughout the U.S., and the genital mutilation and
castration frequently involved suggest a clear link between racialization and fears of
hypermasculinity and violent sexual deviance. Joy James draws on this history to analyze contemporary
racialized state violence, arguing that state practices of surveillance and discipline read sexual and social deviance or
danger through racialization processes. Moreover, she writes, “some bodies appear more docile than others because of
their conformity in appearance to idealized models of class, color, and sex; their bodies are allowed greater leeway to be
self-policed or policed without physical force” (James 1996: 26). These examples demonstrate that perceived
gender normativity is not limited strictly to gender, but is always infused with regulatory
norms of race, class, sexuality and nationality. Thus individuals need not be transgenderidentified to be classified as gender-nonconforming. Bodies may be perceived as abnormal or deviant
because of gender presentations read through systems of racism, classism, heterosexism, and particularly in the case of
the Advisory’s focus on Al-Qaeda, Islamophobia. The impetus for state classification and surveillance of deviant bodies
has increased dramatically in the context of amplified monitoring of immigration and heightened
nationalist security measures justified by the rhetoric of the War on Terror. This environment spurred the
passage of the Real ID Act in 2005; legislation endorsed by the 9/11 Commission, which noted that “for
terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons” (Department of Homeland Security 2008). The Real ID Act
establishes minimum standards for U.S. driver’s licenses and non-driver IDs, with the intention that by 2013 any ID
card that is non-compliant with these standards will be invalid for activities such as air travel, access to
government buildings, or access to federal funding such as Social Security. Stricter standards are to be used to
verify identities, citizenship, names and birthdates. Draft regulations also specify that Real ID cards and all supporting
documents used to create them (birth certificates, Social Security cards, court-ordered name changes, etc.) be
linked through a federal database and stored there for 7-10 years.¶ It is noteworthy that the Act was passed through
Congress with little debate (and with unanimous final approval from the Senate), four years after 9/11 and as the
U.S. waged war in at least two countries. The ease with which the Act passed may be attributed to the fact that it was
tacked onto an emergency spending bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his historical account of Britain’s
attempts to institute a national ID card, Jon Agar argues that only during wartime could such universal identification
processes be justified and implemented. He notes that increased concern over fraudulent identities proved to be a major
argument in favor of continuing the compulsory national identity documents instituted during World War II. Efforts to
maintain individual identity converged with efforts to regulate sexual practices and
gendered relationship structures, as post-war attempts to shore up the nuclear family took the form of public
outcry against bigamy, viewed by the British state and general public as a “foreign” practice that enabled both sexual
deviance and multiple identities. Agar writes that “bigamy starkly highlighted the extent to which social institutions
depended on individuals living under one, and only one, identity,” fuelling desires not just to continue the cards, but to
expand the amount of information they contained (Agar 2001: 116). For many, compulsory ID cards recalled totalitarian
governing associated with Nazi Germany, and conflicted with British ideals of privacy and individualism. Yet the possibility
that such cards could eradicate bigamist practices – securing individual accountability alongside normative sexuality and
family structure – provided its own form of national differentiation. Moreover, because ID cards were touted as
preventative measures against stolen identities, state regulation of identity was encouraged as a personal right and civil
liberty, a method of increasing lawful citizens’ security. The state thus implied that those who had nothing to hide had
nothing to fear from the implementation of national identification.¶ The Real ID Act and the discourses
surrounding it echo much of this rhetoric. In the context of U.S. nationalism that seeks to eradicate the foreign, the
Act is most overtly directed at the figures of the immigrant and the terrorist, certainly not
imagined as mutually exclusive categories. To eliminate these figures, the Act increases
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
7
state surveillance of identity by requiring and storing a single identity for each individual.
But maintaining a singular, consistent, and legally documented identity is deeply
complicated for many gender-nonconforming people: for example, common law name
changes mean there is no court order to be filed with a Real ID card. Similarly, different state
agencies define “change of sex” differently (with some requiring one surgical procedure, some another, and others no
surgery at all), making a single gender marker on the Real ID card difficult if not impossible. Ironically, the state’s
own contradictory methods of determining and designating legal gender and sex render
Real ID cards ineffectual. Even as these cards would work to create and enforce singular
and static identities for individuals, they simultaneously work to expose the fluidity and
confusion characterizing state policies on identity documents. As Jane Caplan and John Torpey
argue, “[t]he very multiplicity of these documents may [...] disrupt the state’s ostensibly monolithic front” (Caplan 2001: 7).
Thus state regulation of gender and gendered bodies can actually function to reveal ambiguities in the state itself. ¶
Moreover, such policies point to the ways that concealing and revealing trans identity
actually depend on one another, demonstrating the impossibility of thinking these actions
as binary opposites. To conceal one’s trans status under the law requires full disclosure
to the medico-legal system, which keeps on public record all steps taken toward
transition. That same system is later invoked when individuals seek to prove their trans status through medical and
legal documents that ostensibly serve to obscure or even disappear such status. Thus concealment necessarily entails
disclosure, and vice versa.¶ That the Real ID Act, created as part of a war funding bill and approved
in a climate of fear and militarization, seeks to maintain individual identities and make
them more accessible to state agencies speaks to the ways that multiple, ambiguous or shifting identities
are viewed as menacing and risky on a national scale. Alongside more overt statements like the DHS Advisory, the
Real ID Act and SSA no- match letters function as significant state practices and policies that link
gender ambiguity with national security threats. Like other new security measures, the Real ID Act is
promoted as benign – even beneficial – for those citizens with nothing to hide. Yet concealment is strongly associated
with the category of transgender, a perception fueled by cultural depictions of trans deception and by the medico- legal
system that aims to normalize trans bodies while simultaneously meticulously tracking and documenting gender changes.
Reacting to these cultural and legislative constraints, transgender activist and advocacy organizations increasingly
engage with new state security measures in efforts to maintain safety both of the nation and of individual transgenderidentified people.
Queer migrants exemplify what it means to occupy the shifting borders of
contemporary biopolitical governance. Identification regimes constitute
borders that define access to the human, exposing all others to murderous
violence
Ajana ‘5 (Btihaj, Digital Humanities @ Kings College, “Surveillance and Biopolitics,”
Electronic Journal of Sociology
http://www.sociology.org/content/2005/tier1/ajana_biopolitics.pdf)
Nevertheless, such conceptualisation misses the point that borders
are not merely that which is erected at the
edges of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but more so borders are ubiquitous (Balibar, 2002:
84) and infinitely actualised within mundane processes of ‘internal’ administration and
bureaucratic organization1 blurring the dualistic logic of the inside and the outside on which Western sovereignty is
calibrated. The point is that in addition to this crude dual division within the global world order there are further divisions, further
segmentations, a ‘hypersegmentation’ (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that monolithic (Western) half which functions by means of
excluding the already-excluded on the one hand and incorporating the already-included and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the
other. This is done more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and excluding concurrently ‘through a principle of activity’
Surveillance is the enduring of exclusion for some and
the performance of inclusion for others to the point where it becomes almost impossible
to demonstrate one’s ‘inclusion’ without having to go through the labyrinth of security
controls and identity validation, intensified mainly, but not solely, at the borders. It is in similar contexts that Balibar
(2002: 81) invokes the notion of ‘world apartheid’ in which the dual regime of circulation is creating different
(Rose, 1999: 240) and interwoven circuits of security.
phenomenological experiences for different people through the ‘polysemic nature’ (Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed,
borders are not merely territorial dividers but spatial zones of surveillance designed to
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
8
establish ‘an international class differentiation’ and deploy ‘instruments of discrimination
and triage’ (Balibar, 2002: 82) whereby the rich asserts a ‘surplus of right’ (Balibar, 2002: 83) and the poor continue to exercise the
Sisyphean activity of circulating upwards and downwards until the border becomes his/her place of ‘dwelling’ (Kachra, 2005: 123) or until
s/he becomes the border itself. Sadly,
to be a border is to ‘live a life which is a waiting-to-live, a non-life’
biopolitics of borders is precisely the management of that waiting-tolive, the management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those who are forcibly placed in detention
centres), and at times, it is the management of death. The death of thousand of refugees and
‘clandestine’ migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait of Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the
world’s largest mass grave), asphyxiated in trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in 2000 inside an airtight
truck at the port of Dover), crushed under trains (the case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in the USMexican border for example). It is the management of ‘bodies that do not matter’. It is the management of the
(Balibar, 2002: 83).¶ The
bodies of those to whom the status of the ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben, 1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management of those whose death has
the biopolitics of
borders is also the management of ‘life’; the life of those who are capable of performing
‘responsible self-government’ (Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who can
demonstrate their ‘legitimacy’ through ‘worthy’ computer-readable passports/ID cards that
provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing of identity and citizenship at the
border.¶ The juxtaposition of death and life at the borders is by no means an ad hoc occurrence but an affirmation of the inadequate
fallen into the abyss of insignificance and whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand,
immigration policies and the ‘immanentist’ (Nancy, 1991: 3) politics of absolute enclosure. From this emerges the issue of ‘sorting’ that may
override the term ‘racism’ as long as it is not designated to a specific race or insofar as it is ‘racism without race’ as Balibar prefers to put it.
Racism for Foucault (2003 [1976]: 255) (and here racism has a figurative function just as the metaphors of leprosy and plague do) is
that which creates fragmentation within the biological continuum and caesuras within
species-bodies so that biopolitical sorting and (sub)divisions could take place between those who are deemed to be
‘superior’ and those who are made to be perceived as the ‘inferior’ type all with the aim to preserve the ‘well-being’, ‘safety’, ‘security’ and
‘purity’ of the ‘healthy’ (powerful) population (‘virtues’ which are undoubtedly contributing to the naturalisation and taken-for- grantedness of
institutional racism, and the inscription of modes of exclusionary differentiations in many subtle ways so that the need of accountability is
made redundant.)¶ Embedded
within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous
enterprise. Murderous not insofar as it involves extermination (although this might still be the case) but inasmuch as it exerts a
biopower that exposes ‘someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or,
quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 256), and inasmuch as it is ‘based on
a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence’ (Zylinska, 2004: 530); a symbolic
violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of ‘naming’ as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’,
‘deportees’, ‘illegal immigrants’, etc) as well as a material one (for example, placing ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ in detention
centres), attesting
to that epistemic impulse to resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and
the residual of disciplinary powers that seek to eliminate and ostracise the unwanted-other
through the insidious refashioning of the ‘final solution’ for the asylum and immigration
‘question’. Such an image has been captured by Braidotti (1994: 20):¶ Once, landing at Paris International Airport, I saw all of these in
between areas occupied by immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived, but were not allowed entry, so
they camped in these luxurious transit zones, waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and
not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the margins and non-belonging can be hell.¶ The
biopolitics of borders stands
as the quintessential domain for this kind of sorting, this kind of racism pervading Western socio-political imaginary
and permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial sovereignty despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task of sorting
and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border security and surveillance are designed making ‘the management of misery
and misfortune ... a potentially profitable activity’ (Rose, 1999: 260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism
(Coward, 1999: 18) where
‘control’ and ‘security’ are resting upon vast investments in new
information and communications technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not
eradicate, the infiltration and ‘riskiness’ of the ‘unwanted’ . For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper,
‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ (2002), the UK government outlines a host of techniques and strategies aimed at controlling borders and
tightening security including the use of Gamma X-ray scanners, heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to detect humans
smuggled in vehicles
Plan: The USFG should repeal the driver’s license provisions in the Real ID
act
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
9
Sheet Two: Solvency
Resistance to the Real ID act key to trans activism
Spade ‘7 (Dean, founder of Sylvia Riveria Law Project and teaching fellow @ UCLA Law
School/Harvard Law School, “Methodologies of Transresistance,” A Companion to
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer studies, 247)
To exemplify the utilization of these criteria, let us look at the examples focused on in this section: hate-crimes laws, the
Real ID Act, the inclusion of trans health care in existing health-insurance systems, and access to homeless-shelters for
trans people. According to these criteria, campaigns for hate-crimes laws would not fit within a trans anti-oppression
campaign. They increase the vulnerability of trans people who are already targets of the criminal justice system,
especially people of color and poor people who are overexposed to police violence and criminal punishment. They provide
no immediate survival relief to trans people, because they have never been proven to prevent hate crimes, but they
increase resources to the criminal justice system which currently endangers trans people’s survival. ¶ The Real ID
Act, however, would make sense as a target of trans activism, because opposing it would
benefit many of the most vulnerable trans people, immigrants and those for whom lack of
access to ID results in the most severe consequences: youth, undocumented people, homeless people,
poor people, and people of color. Because this legislation endangers the safety and survival of many
highly vulnerable trans people, because it comports with a vision of reduced surveillance
and increased privacy of trans people’s medical histories, and because it is about
repealing this legislation but not institution-building or legitimizing, it emerges as a wise
priority for trans activists.
Queer contestation of gender identification regimes is key to
establishing new norms of statecraft that are the prerequisite of
new genderings. As the experience of the Sylvia Rivera Law
Project proves, challenging gender normativity at the level of
POLICY is key
Shotwell ’12 (Alexis, Sociology and Anthropology @ Carleton University, “Open
Normativities: Gender, Disability, and collective political change,” Signs: Journal of
Women Culture and Society 37:4
http://alexisshotwell.com/research_files/Signs%20preprint.pdf)
state surveillance regimes intensify in the era of US-lead wars on “terror,”
identity documents are a site of considerable friction. States govern closely the capacity to change gender
Particularly as
identification on passports and birth certificates. Such control affects more than the very small number of people who want to change the
the state’s commitment to gender norms
as a technology for governance; everyone who moves through the classificatory processes that stabilize gender binaries
sex notations on their documents: Here it is possible to glimpse the depth of
is at the same time experiencing state regimes of norm-enforcement. This enforcement may be mystified and occluded, and it¶ certainly
affects people differently depending on their situation, but it is real. Documenting identity is
one way the state manages
the movement, housing, job prospects, and other material markers of people’s lives . In fact,
most points of contact with state institutions – and not only within North America – are mediated through gendered forms of identity
validation. Looking at the practices around issuing
and changing identity documents can reveal
significant sites of normalization and also of norm-shifting.¶ SRLP’s critique of a 2006 decision11 about what
surgeries trans people in New York must have in order to change the sex/gender notation on their birth certificate is a good example of their work promulgate freer
gender self-expression.12 From 2002, they worked with “the New York City Bureau of Vital Statistics to try to get them to change their birth certificate sex
designation change policy to not require genital surgery” (http://srlp.org/node/88) In 2006 the NYC Board of Health decided to allow sex designation changes on
birth certificates, although as their press release notes, the “Health Code will continue to require proof that the applicant has undergone convertive surgery” (Board
of Health).¶ As the SRLP response points out, not only is there a wide range in the technologies trans people are able and interested in taking up in the process of
living their gendered lives, the legal definitions of “convertive” surgery vary by place (and, in some countries, by doctor). They write:¶ The old policy allowed people
to receive new birth certificates only if they provided extensive evidence of very specific, expensive, inaccessible, and often unindicated¶ genital surgeries -vaginoplasty (the creation of vagina) or phalloplasty (the creation of a penis). The majority of transgender people do not have one of these two surgeries,
particularly transgender men who are estimated to have phalloplasty at a rate of less than 10%. Ironically, New York State uses a different narrow set of surgeries
as its basis for changing birth certificates: hysterectomy and mastectomy (female-to-male), or penectomy (male-to-female). The two policies beside each other
show how arbitrary they are, and how inappropriate a basis for policymaking misunderstandings of a whole population's health care really is
(http://srlp.org/node/89)¶ People use many practices to enact and transform gender, and SRLP was working – in coalition with a number of other groups – to
secure policy recognition for (more of) the variety of these enactments. Medical evidentiary requirements flatten this complexity, offering in its stead categories
(whether “anatomical sex change” or “convertive surgery”) simultaneously out of reach of and not desired by many trans people.13 SRLP instead argues for a form
of self-transformation that is utterly reliant on and tangled with world- transformation, and is at the same time critical of a liberal-individualist voluntarism implicit in
the New York City Board of Health’s decision and its reliance on genital surgery.¶ While laudable, SRLP’s consistent advocacy for proliferations of gender
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
10
practices and classifications in situations like the birth certificate struggle could well be voluntarist – just having more freedoms does not do away with possessive
individualism. But I believe that the form of self-determination that SRLP invokes can be read as non-voluntarist in at least three ways. First, any medical
intervention is necessarily collaborative, involving self-advocacy, expertise, material resources, and communication. There is no way for an individual to change
their secondary sex characteristics by sheer force of will. This is precisely why some of SRLP’s work involves consultations and trainings with medical providers
and why doctors, nurses, and pharmacists require training to be more adequate to the needs of trans and genderqueer people. It is also presumably one reason
SRLP does work to help grow trans people’s capacities for self-advocacy. Second, the structure of the organization is explicitly organized around a commitment to
collectively and community- based decision making processes. Through grounding the work in specific local struggles, remaining accountable to constituencies,
and mixing direct work with policy and law agendas, the organization practices a form of thinking and activism explicitly counter to individualist practices and aims.
Third, the forms of transformation SRLP and others work toward are concerned with a widespread transformation of the world, not merely access to forms of
existing, disciplined gender enactment. Rather, they work for a foundational shift in social relations at every level. Recall this part of their mission statement: “SRLP
is a collective organization founded on the understanding that gender self-determination is inextricably intertwined with racial, social and economic justice”
Gender
transformations are always social, with social effects.¶ This final aspect of SRLP’s approach points to an
(http://srlp.org/about). To base one’s work on these intersections of justice renders the work more than collective; it is to some extent revolutionary.
orientation that many have characterized as an important part of the queer ethos of early gay liberation struggles. Queer activist-theorist
Mattilda reinvokes¶ the radical potential of queer identity to enable everyone to choose their gender, sexual, and social identities, to
embrace a radical outsider perspective, and to¶ ¶ challenge everything that’s sickening about the dominant cultures around us¶ (Mattilda,
8).¶ In the U.S., queer critique of what Duggan terms “homonationalism” echoes this re- invocation, calling for a return to an understanding
of liberating sexuality as capable of changing every aspect of the world. For groups like the Gay Liberation Front, a liberated sexuality
implied anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-oppression altogether. Read
in an anti-oppression lineage
of queer struggle, SRLP is not simply protecting individual freedoms of gender selfexpression; they are proliferating gendered possibilities as part of a radical strategy for
fundamental social change. Their work resists the force of normalization on individual and social scales.¶ The
proposal voted down by the New York City Board of Health would have shifted the
prescriptive force of state normalization to more closely map actual (descriptive) practices
of living genders, which also make claims on how we “ought” to be able to do gender. Gender change and affiliated sex
designation would, had the proposed guidelines gone through, not be necessarily tied to very particular genital surgeries but would
rather have the potential to be determined based on more collaborative and socially-determined criteria for gender enactment. This
proposal relied as a first step on the power of asserting oppressed people’s capacities for
self-determination, centering those who are usually marginalized. Shifting the criteria for corrected birth
certificates from individually-grounded “convertive” surgery to flexibly and relationally-grounded markers of gender does more than critique
a voluntarist and individualist model of gender definition. It also recognizes that gender is produced through social worlds as much as
through fleshy signifiers .
Contesting policy decisions that reduce gender to genitals allows us to
formulate and understand gender more accurately, and to shape policies more closely
attuned to reality . In Canguilhem’s¶ terms, SRLP – and other organizations and people pursuing this kind of work – is
normative in the sense that they shift the terrain of what is correct, good, to be pursued, or
acceptable, endorsed, or allowed. Rather than simply contesting one normative story – here,
a narrative that conflates gender with genitals and then asserts that this is a proper and good conflation – expanding the criteria
for changing gender status marks the creation of narratives to account for and produce
other modes of “doing gender.” These new narratives, then, counter some norms while simultaneously setting new
norms. They don’t swap out one restrictive norm for another – rather, they set norms that expand the space of what
can be pursued, endorsed, and so on. This is one aspect of what I call open normativities.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
11
1AC – Short
(To be read with the federalism advantage)
Plan: The United States Supreme Court should find the driver’s license
provision of the Real ID act unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
12
Contention (
): Gender Normativity
Real ID criminalizes gender nonconformity - lands transgender immigrants in
detention centers indefinitely
Turney ’11 (CT, Comments Editor @ UCLA, “Give me your Tired, your Poor, your
Queer,” Law Review 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, Lexis Nexis)¶
The REAL ID Act will likely provide unnecessary administrative burdens on government and intrude on individual privacy.
Pursuant to the REAL ID Act, "states will be required to make electronic copies of all documents available in a national
database to an undefined group of people, including law enforcement officials, for at least 10 years." n64 Further, as
stated above, each city, state, and federal agency has a different requirement for changing one's gender marker on an
identification card. n65 Some agencies require proof of extremely expensive, rare, and often unattainable genital
surgeries before they will change a person's gender marker. n66 Finally, because the REAL ID Act requires
that identification [*330] has a gender marker, it could have the effect of foreclosing all
advocacy attempts to abolish gender markers and eliminate the complications that
transgender people currently have with identification . n67
The recently enacted regulations do not set forth a policy for changing one's gender on their REAL ID, and on the surface
it seems that the federal government will defer to the individual state procedures for changing a gender marker. n68 It is
unclear how the central information system database, apparently intended to be shared
and accessible to an "undefined group of people," will stay coordinated as individual
records are changed. As with Social Security records and state driver's licenses, it is not uncommon that
transgender immigrants have mismatches in identification across multiple databases, mismatches which could be
perceived as "fraudulent." As the American Civil Liberties Union ("ACLU") explained in its REAL ID Regulation
"Scorecard," the regulations are inconclusive with regards to how they will affect transgender people. n69 ¶ Although the
regulations' requirement that identity documents include a gender designation remains problematic, the regulations do not
interfere with the purview of states to issue gender identity-appropriate documents to transgender individuals. However,
the final regulations fail to ensure the security of personal data, which is of particular
concern to transgender individuals given that the disclosure of such data may subject
them to harassment and other forms of discrimination . n70 The reliance on surveillance through
identification in this so-called "age of terror" is already so inaccurate and wrought with problems that the implementation of
the REAL ID Act can only lead to disastrous and discriminatory impacts for low-income
transgender immigrants. n71 It is likely that any "criminal violations" associated with a REAL ID, one's failure to
have a REAL ID, or being deemed "fraudulent" according to one's REAL ID, will result in acts
that are designated as "crimes of moral turpitude" pursuant to immigration law. This, in
turn, will work to speed up the process of criminalization, detention, and eventually,
deportation for transgender immigrants.
Detention increases queer immigrants’ vulnerability to violence and sexual
assault
Turney ’11 (CT, Comments Editor @ UCLA, “Give me your Tired, your Poor, your
Queer,” Law Review 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, Lexis Nexis)¶
once LGBTQ people are in detention they
face specific issues beyond the typical loss of liberty associated with imprisonment. These include increased risk of violence for all LGBTQ
Aside from being affected by changing policies regarding who must be detained,
prisoners and particular health needs for transgender prisoners. In the criminal detention context, the fact that LGBTQ prisoners face specific hardships is well
established. n95 While there is little completed scholarly work or research in the immigration detention context, what has been done supports the notion that
This is further bolstered by the fact that nearly two-thirds of
all detainees are held in local jail facilities, and therefore under the same conditions as
those in a criminal detention context. n97¶ [*1360] ¶ 1. Increased Risks of Violence for LGBTQ Detainees¶ ¶ In the contexts of
incarceration and detention, LGBTQ individuals face higher levels of violence and sexual violence
than most non-LGBTQ prisoners. Two of the highest-risk groups are male-bodied gender nonconforming prisoners and
male-to-female (M-T-F) transgender prisoners. n98 M-T-F transgender detainees are at especially high risk for abuse
due to prison housing policies. Most prison and detention facilities house detainees according to their assigned sex at birth and external
genitalia, n99 a practice which often literally results in women being detained in men's facilities. n100¶ A study of sexual violence in California prisons
released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation found that 67 percent of LGBTQ inmates reported
being sexually assaulted, a rate fifteen times higher than the overall population . n101 A 2007 study
LGBTQ detainees face many of the same issues. n96
from the University of California, Irvine, found that 59 percent of transgender inmates reported being sexually assaulted, a rate thirteen times higher than the
overall population. n102¶ There is some evidence that the numbers in California prisons may be higher than those nationwide, as California prisons have been
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
13
shown to have much higher overall rates of sexual assault than other states. n103 While this indicates that national rates of violence in overall prison populations
are lower [*1361] than those found in the California studies, it does not necessarily indicate that LGBTQ prisoners' proportional risk of violence is lower
nationwide. Indeed, Just Detention International (JDI), a human rights organization that works to end sexual abuse in all forms of imprisonment, reports that
roughly one in five survivors who contact JDI each year self-identify as LGBTQ. n104¶ As noted above, there is less research about violence towards LGBTQ
detainees in the immigration context. The bureaucratic and insular nature of immigration detention facilities makes it difficult for researchers to conduct empirical
research to determine the precise incidence of violence in detention centers, or the degree to which LGBTQ people experience violence. n105 However, based on
lawsuits and anecdotes, researchers know that problems of violence and sexual violence do exist in immigration detention. n106¶ In addition to facing similar risks
immigrant detainees often struggle with significant
obstacles to reporting acts of violence and to obtaining protection from their attackers
beyond the difficulties typical to detention and prison environments . These obstacles include language
of violence that prisoners in criminal detention contexts face,
barriers, n107 a pervasive lack of access to legal representation, n108 the unresponsive nature of detention bureaucracy, n109 and the substantial power
imbalance between detainees - desperate to stay in the United States - and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - which not only operates the detention
through ICE, but also holds detainees' fates in its hands through ICE and the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the department that makes admission
and deportation decisions.
Real ID conflates gender nonconformity with national security - the policing of
gender dovetails U.S. white supremacy and militaristic imperialism
Beauchamp ‘9 (Tony, Gender and Woman Studies @ UC Davis, “Artful Surveillance
and Strategic Visibility: Transgender bodies and the US state of surveillance after 9/11,”
Surveillance and Society 6.4, 359-360)
Joy James draws on this history to analyze contemporary racialized state violence, arguing that state practices of surveillance and
discipline read sexual and social deviance or danger through racialization processes. Moreover, she writes, “some bodies appear more
docile than others because of their conformity in appearance to idealized models of class, color, and sex; their bodies are allowed greater
leeway to be self-policed or policed without physical force” (James 1996: 26). These examples demonstrate that
perceived
gender normativity is not limited strictly to gender, but is always infused with regulatory
norms of race, class, sexuality and nationality. Thus individuals need not be transgenderidentified to be classified as gender-nonconforming.
Bodies may be perceived as abnormal or deviant
because of gender presentations read through systems of racism, classism, heterosexism, and particularly in the case of the Advisory’s
focus on Al-Qaeda, Islamophobia. The impetus for state classification and surveillance of deviant bodies has increased dramatically in the
context of amplified
monitoring of immigration and heightened nationalist security measures
justified by the rhetoric of the War on Terror. This environment spurred the passage of the Real ID Act in 2005;
legislation endorsed by the 9/11 Commission, which noted that “for terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons” (Department
of Homeland Security 2008). The Real ID Act establishes minimum standards for U.S. driver’s licenses and non-driver IDs, with the
intention that by 2013 any ID card that is non-compliant with these standards will be invalid for activities such as air travel,
access to government buildings, or access to federal funding such as Social Security. Stricter standards are to be used to verify
identities, citizenship, names and birthdates. Draft regulations also specify that Real ID cards and all supporting documents used to create
them (birth certificates, Social Security cards, court-ordered name changes, etc.) be linked through a federal database and stored
there for 7-10 years.¶ It is noteworthy that the Act was passed through Congress with little debate (and with unanimous final
approval from the Senate), four years after 9/11 and as the U.S. waged war in at least two countries. The ease with which the Act passed
may be attributed to the fact that it was tacked onto an emergency spending bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his historical
account of Britain’s attempts to institute a national ID card, Jon Agar argues that only during wartime could such universal identification
processes be justified and implemented. He notes that increased concern over fraudulent identities proved to be a major argument in favor
Efforts to maintain individual
identity converged with efforts to regulate sexual practices and gendered relationship
structures, as post-war attempts to shore up the nuclear family took the form of public outcry against bigamy, viewed by the British
of continuing the compulsory national identity documents instituted during World War II.
state and general public as a “foreign” practice that enabled both sexual deviance and multiple identities. Agar writes that “bigamy starkly
highlighted the extent to which social institutions depended on individuals living under one, and only one, identity,” fuelling desires not just
to continue the cards, but to expand the amount of information they contained (Agar 2001: 116). For many, compulsory ID cards recalled
totalitarian governing associated with Nazi Germany, and conflicted with British ideals of privacy and individualism. Yet the possibility that
such cards could eradicate bigamist practices – securing individual accountability alongside normative sexuality and family structure –
provided its own form of national differentiation. Moreover, because ID cards were touted as preventative measures against stolen
identities, state regulation of identity was encouraged as a personal right and civil liberty, a method of increasing lawful citizens’ security.
The state thus implied that those who had nothing to hide had nothing to fear from the implementation of national identification. ¶ The
Real ID Act and the discourses surrounding it echo much of this rhetoric. In the context of U.S. nationalism that
seeks to eradicate the foreign, the Act is most overtly directed at the figures of the immigrant and the
terrorist, certainly not imagined as mutually exclusive categories. To eliminate these
figures, the Act increases state surveillance of identity by requiring and storing a single
identity for each individual. But maintaining a singular, consistent, and legally
documented identity is deeply complicated for many gender-nonconforming people: for
example, common law name changes mean there is no court order to be filed with a Real ID
card. Similarly, different state agencies define “change of sex” differently (with some requiring one surgical procedure, some another,
and others no surgery at all), making a single gender marker on the Real ID card difficult if not impossible. Ironically, the state’s own
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
14
Even as these
cards would work to create and enforce singular and static identities for individuals, they
simultaneously work to expose the fluidity and confusion characterizing state policies on
identity documents. As Jane Caplan and John Torpey argue, “[t]he very multiplicity of these documents may [...] disrupt the
contradictory methods of determining and designating legal gender and sex render Real ID cards ineffectual.
state’s ostensibly monolithic front” (Caplan 2001: 7). Thus state regulation of gender and gendered bodies can actually function to reveal
ambiguities in the state itself.¶ Moreover, such
policies point to the ways that concealing and revealing
trans identity actually depend on one another, demonstrating the impossibility of thinking
these actions as binary opposites. To conceal one’s trans status under the law requires
full disclosure to the medico-legal system, which keeps on public record all steps taken
toward transition. That same system is later invoked when individuals seek to prove their trans status through medical and legal
documents that ostensibly serve to obscure or even disappear such status. Thus concealment necessarily entails disclosure, and vice
versa.¶ That the
Real ID Act, created as part of a war funding bill and approved in a climate of
fear and militarization, seeks to maintain individual identities and make them more
accessible to state agencies speaks to the ways that multiple, ambiguous or shifting identities are viewed as menacing and
risky on a national scale. Alongside more overt statements like the DHS Advisory, the Real ID Act and SSA no- match letters
function as significant state practices and policies that link gender ambiguity with national
security threats. Like other new security measures, the Real ID Act is promoted as benign – even beneficial – for those citizens
with nothing to hide. Yet concealment is strongly associated with the category of transgender, a perception fueled by cultural depictions of
trans deception and by the medico- legal system that aims to normalize trans bodies while simultaneously meticulously tracking and
documenting gender changes. Reacting to these cultural and legislative constraints, transgender activist and advocacy organizations
increasingly engage with new state security measures in efforts to maintain safety both of the nation and of individual transgender-identified
people.
Conflation of queer and threat results in murderous biopolitics
Puar ‘7 (Jasbir, Women and Gender Studies @ Rutgers, Terrorist Assemblages p. xi-xii)
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is an invitation to deeper exploration of these connections among sexuality,
race, gender, na- tion, class, and ethnicity in relation to the tactics, strategies, and logistics of war machines. This project critiques the
fostering, managing, and valorizing of life and all that sustains it, describing the mechanisms by which queerness as a
process of racialization informs the very distinctions between life and death , wealth and poverty,
health and illness, fertility and morbidity, security and insecurity, living and dying. Race, ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality
disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer na- tional subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of
illegitimate queerness that name and ultimately propel populations into extinction.'l Terrorist Assemblages foregrounds the
proliferation, occupation, and suppression of queernesses in relation to patriotism, war, torture, security, death, terror, terrorism,
detention, and deportation, themes usually imagined as devoid of connection to sexual politics in gen- eral and queer politics in
particular. Impelled not only by this folding of queer and other sexual national subjects into
the biopolitical management of life, but by the simultaneous folding out of life, out toward
death, of queerly racialized "terrorist populations," biopolitics delineates not only which
queers live and which queers die-a variable and contestable demarcation-but also how
queers live and die. The result of the successes of queer incorporation into the domains of consumer markets and social
recogni- tion in the post-civil rights, late twentieth century, these various entries by queers into the biopolitical optimization of life
mark a shift, as homosexual bodies have been historically understood as endlessly cathected to death. In other words, there is a
transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the
United States, from being figures of death (i.e., the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of
life and productivity (i.e., gay marriage and families). The politics of recognition and incorporation entail that certain-but
certainly not most-homosexual, gay, and queer bodies may be the temporary recipients of the "measures of benevolence" that are
afforded by liberal discourses of multicultural tolerance and diversity.lO This benevolence toward
sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship
normativity, and bodily integrity. The contemporary emergence of homosexual, gay, and queer
subjects-normativized through their deviance (as it becomes surveilled, managed, studied) rather than
despite it-is integral to the interplay of perversion and normativity necessary to sustain in
full gear the management of life. In making this argument, I deploy "racialization" as a figure for specific social formations and processes that are not necessarily or only tied to what has been historically theorized as "race." ¶ The emergence
and sanctioning of queer subjecthood is a historical shift condoned only through a
parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or
death, a reintensification of racialization through queerness. The cultivation of these
homosexual subjects folded into life, enabled through "market virility" and "regenerative re- productivity," is
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
15
racially demarcated and paralleled by a rise in the targeting of queerly raced bodies for
dying. If the "turn to life" for queer subjects is now possible, how queerness folds into racialization is a crucial factor in whether and
how that turn to life is experienced, if it is experienced at all. Further, the rise of these nonnormative national
subjects is linked in no uncertain terms to the racialized populations that come into being
through the assignment of queerness, an assignment disavowed by the queer subject
embraced by biopolitical incitement to life.
Queer contestation of gender identification regimes is key to
establishing new norms of statecraft that are the prerequisite of
new genderings. As the experience of the Sylvia Rivera Law
Project proves, challenging gender normativity at the level of
POLICY is key
Shotwell ’12 (Alexis, Sociology and Anthropology @ Carleton University, “Open
Normativities: Gender, Disability, and collective political change,” Signs: Journal of
Women Culture and Society 37:4
http://alexisshotwell.com/research_files/Signs%20preprint.pdf)
as state surveillance regimes intensify in the era of US-lead wars on “terror,”
identity documents are a site of considerable friction. States govern closely the capacity to change gender identification
Particularly
on passports and birth certificates. Such control affects more than the very small number of people who want to change the sex notations on their documents:
the state’s commitment to gender norms as a technology for
governance; everyone who moves through the classificatory processes that stabilize gender binaries is at the same time experiencing state regimes of
Here it is possible to glimpse the depth of
norm-enforcement. This enforcement may be mystified and occluded, and it¶ certainly affects people differently depending on their situation, but it is real.
is one way the state manages the movement, housing, job prospects, and
other material markers of people’s lives. In fact, most points of contact with state institutions – and not only within North America –
are mediated through gendered forms of identity validation. Looking at the practices around issuing and changing identity
documents can reveal significant sites of normalization and also of norm-shifting.¶ SRLP’s
Documenting identity
critique of a 2006 decision11 about what surgeries trans people in New York must have in order to change the sex/gender notation on their birth certificate is a
good example of their work promulgate freer gender self-expression.12 From 2002, they worked with “the New York City Bureau of Vital Statistics to try to get
them to change their birth certificate sex designation change policy to not require genital surgery” (http://srlp.org/node/88) In 2006 the NYC Board of Health
decided to allow sex designation changes on birth certificates, although as their press release notes, the “Health Code will continue to require proof that the
applicant has undergone convertive surgery” (Board of Health).¶ As the SRLP response points out, not only is there a wide range in the technologies trans people
are able and interested in taking up in the process of living their gendered lives, the legal definitions of “convertive” surgery vary by place (and, in some countries,
by doctor). They write:¶ The old policy allowed people to receive new birth certificates only if they provided extensive evidence of very specific, expensive,
inaccessible, and often unindicated¶ genital surgeries -- vaginoplasty (the creation of vagina) or phalloplasty (the creation of a penis). The majority of transgender
people do not have one of these two surgeries, particularly transgender men who are estimated to have phalloplasty at a rate of less than 10%. Ironically, New
York State uses a different narrow set of surgeries as its basis for changing birth certificates: hysterectomy and mastectomy (female-to-male), or penectomy (maleto-female). The two policies beside each other show how arbitrary they are, and how inappropriate a basis for policymaking misunderstandings of a whole
population's health care really is (http://srlp.org/node/89)¶ People use many practices to enact and transform gender, and SRLP was working – in coalition with a
number of other groups – to secure policy recognition for (more of) the variety of these enactments. Medical evidentiary requirements flatten this complexity,
offering in its stead categories (whether “anatomical sex change” or “convertive surgery”) simultaneously out of reach of and not desired by many trans people.13
SRLP instead argues for a form of self-transformation that is utterly reliant on and tangled with world- transformation, and is at the same time critical of a liberalindividualist voluntarism implicit in the New York City Board of Health’s decision and its reliance on genital surgery.¶ While laudable, SRLP’s consistent advocacy
for proliferations of gender practices and classifications in situations like the birth certificate struggle could well be voluntarist – just having more freedoms does not
do away with possessive individualism. But I believe that the form of self-determination that SRLP invokes can be read as non-voluntarist in at least three ways.
First, any medical intervention is necessarily collaborative, involving self-advocacy, expertise, material resources, and communication. There is no way for an
individual to change their secondary sex characteristics by sheer force of will. This is precisely why some of SRLP’s work involves consultations and trainings with
medical providers and why doctors, nurses, and pharmacists require training to be more adequate to the needs of trans and genderqueer people. It is also
presumably one reason SRLP does work to help grow trans people’s capacities for self-advocacy. Second, the structure of the organization is explicitly organized
around a commitment to collectively and community- based decision making processes. Through grounding the work in specific local struggles, remaining
accountable to constituencies, and mixing direct work with policy and law agendas, the organization practices a form of thinking and activism explicitly counter to
individualist practices and aims. Third, the forms of transformation SRLP and others work toward are concerned with a widespread transformation of the world, not
merely access to forms of existing, disciplined gender enactment. Rather, they work for a foundational shift in social relations at every level. Recall this part of their
mission statement: “SRLP is a collective organization founded on the understanding that gender self-determination is inextricably intertwined with racial, social and
economic justice” (http://srlp.org/about). To base one’s work on these intersections of justice renders the work more than collective; it is to some extent
Gender transformations are always social, with social effects.
revolutionary.
¶ This final aspect of SRLP’s
approach points to an orientation that many have characterized as an important part of the queer ethos of early gay liberation struggles. Queer activist-theorist
Mattilda reinvokes¶ the radical potential of queer identity to enable everyone to choose their gender, sexual, and social identities, to embrace a radical outsider
perspective, and to¶ ¶ challenge everything that’s sickening about the dominant cultures around us¶ (Mattilda, 8).¶ In the U.S., queer critique of what Duggan
terms “homonationalism” echoes this re- invocation, calling for a return to an understanding of liberating sexuality as capable of changing every aspect of the
world. For groups like the Gay Liberation Front, a liberated sexuality implied anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-oppression altogether. Read in
SRLP is not simply protecting individual freedoms of gender
self-expression; they are proliferating gendered possibilities as part of a radical strategy
for fundamental social change. Their work resists the force of normalization on individual and social scales.¶ The proposal
an anti-oppression lineage of queer struggle,
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
16
voted down by the New York City Board of Health would have shifted the prescriptive
force of state normalization to more closely map actual (descriptive) practices of living
genders, which also make claims on how we “ought” to be able to do gender. Gender change and affiliated sex designation would, had the proposed
guidelines gone through, not be necessarily tied to very particular genital surgeries but would rather have the potential to be determined based on more
. This proposal relied as a first step on the power of
asserting oppressed people’s capacities for self-determination, centering those who are
usually marginalized. Shifting the criteria for corrected birth certificates from individually-grounded “convertive” surgery to flexibly and relationallycollaborative and socially-determined criteria for gender enactment
grounded markers of gender does more than critique a voluntarist and individualist model of gender definition. It also recognizes that gender is produced through
social worlds as much as through fleshy signifiers
. Contesting policy decisions that reduce gender to genitals
allows us to formulate and understand gender more accurately, and to shape policies
more closely attuned to reality . In Canguilhem’s¶ terms, SRLP – and other organizations and people pursuing this kind of
work – is normative in the sense that they shift the terrain of what is correct, good, to be
pursued, or acceptable, endorsed, or allowed. Rather than simply contesting one
normative story – here, a narrative that conflates gender with genitals and then asserts that this is a proper and good conflation – expanding
the criteria for changing gender status marks the creation of narratives to account for and
produce other modes of “doing gender.” These new narratives, then, counter some norms while simultaneously setting new
norms. They don’t swap out one restrictive norm for another – rather, they set norms that expand the space of what can
be pursued, endorsed, and so on. This is one aspect of what I call open normativities.
�
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
17
Gender Normativity Impacts
U.S. imperialism and gay panic are linked. Gender normativity reproduces
itself in perpetual war against non-normative bodies
Puar ‘7 (Jasbir, Women and Gender Studies @ Rutgers, Terrorist Assemblages p. 45)
Hate crimes against gays and lesbians are still rationalized through these very same terms: is
not the expression
of "a socially appropriate emotion in socially inappropriate ways" the crux of the"gay
panic" defense? Historical amnesia prevails. In the sway from crimes of moral depravity to crimes of passion,
Ahmad argues, it is not only that the targets of attack have altered, but that the entire mechanism of
scapegoating is now rife with sentiment that is attached to the gendered sexualized and
racial codings of these bodies. It is notable that white. middle- to upper-class, kind-and-gentle college student
Matthew Shepard became the quintessential poster boy for the U.S.-based LGBTIQ antiviolence movement. one that has
spawned a stage production (The Laramie Project) among other consumables.2.9 Indeed, exemplary of this transference
of stigma, positive attributes were attached to Mark Bingham's homosexuality: butch, masculine, rugby player, white,
American, hero, gay patriot, called his mom (i.e., homonational), while negative connotations of
homosexuality were used to racialize and sexualize Osama bin Laden: feminized,
stateless, dark, perverse, pedophilic, disowned by family (i.e., fag).'o What is at stake here is not only
that one is good and the other evil; the homosexuality of Bingham is converted into acceptable patriot values, while the
evilness of bin Laden is more fully and efficaciously rendered through associations with
sexual excess, failed masculinity (Le., femininity), and faggotry.¶ While I have briefly highlighted the most
egregious examples of the collusions between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism-gay conservatives such as Andrew
Sullivan being the easiest and prime target-I am actually more compelled by progressive and liberal discourses of
LGBTIQ identity and how they might unwittingly use, rely upon, or reinscribe U.S. nationalisms, U.S. sexual
exceptionalisms, and homonormative imaginative geographies. The proliferation of queer caricatures in
the media and popular culture (such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and, more recently, Queer Eye for the Straight
Girl), the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling upholding same-sex marriage (2004), and the overturning of
sodomy regulations through the Law- rence and Garner v. Texas ruling (2003) all function as directives
regarding suitable and acceptable kinship, affiliative, and consumption patterns,
consolidating a deracialized queer liberal constituency that makes it less easy to draw delineations
between assimilated gay or lesbian identities and ever-so- vigilant and -resistant queer identities. Even the acronym
LGBTlQ suggests the collapsing into or the analogizing of multiple identity strands. In homo- normative narratives of
nation, there is a dual movement: U.S. patriotism momentarily sanctions some homosexualities,
often through gendered, racial, and class sanitizing, in order to produce "monsterterrorist-fags"; homosex- uals embrace the us-versus-them rhetoric of U.S. patriotism and
thus align themselves with this racist and homophobic production .H Aspects of homo-¶ sexuality
have come within the purview of normative patriotism, incorpora- ting aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the
normalized nation; on the other hand, terrorists are quarantined through equating them with the and practices of failed
heterosexuality, emasculation, and queered ..."hers. This dual process of incorporation and quarantining involves the
articulation of race with nation. Nation, and its associations with modernity ,and racial and class
hierarchies, becomes the defining factor in disaggregating between upright,
domesticatable queernesses that mimic and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out-ofcontrol, untetherable queernesses. Queer theory has contributed to the analysis of the heteronormative
constructions of nation as well as of citizenship. M. Jacqui Alexander claims that the "nation disallows queerness"; V.
Spike Peterson locates "national- ism as heterosexism"; Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have elaborated ". upon
"national heterosexuality."32 But heteronormative penetration paradigms continue to inform
feminist and progressive theorizing of globalization, conquest and war-the land is female
and virgin territory, the invader masculine-epitomized by heterosexual rape as the ultimate
violation of the nation through its emasculating force--a normative colonial genealogy.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
18
Heteronormativity destroys value to life and marks queers as less than
human
Richards ‘98 David A.J. prof. of Law at NYU, (Women, Gays and the Constitution, pg.
348-349
A way of making this point is to observe that homophobic prejudice, like racism and sexism, unjustly distorts the idea of
human rights applicable to both public and private life. The political evil of racism expressed itself in a contemptuous
interpretation of black family life (enforced by antimiscegenation laws that confined blacks, as a separate species, to an
inferior sphere).283 The political evil of sexism expressed itself in a morally degraded interpretation of private life to which
women, as morally inferior, were confined as, in effect, a different species. In similar fashion, the evil of
homophobic prejudice is its degradation of homosexual love to the unspeakably private
and secretive not only politically and socially, but intrapsychically in the person whose
sexuality is homosexual; the intellectual reign of terror that once aimed to impose racism
and anti-Semitism on the larger society and even on these stigmatized minorities
themselves today aims to enforce homophobia at large and self-hating homophobia in
particular on homosexuals as weU.2 Its vehicle is the denigration of gay and lesbian identity as a devalued form of
conscience with which no one, under pain of ascribed membership in such a devalued species, can or should identify.
Such degradation constructs not, as in the case of gender, merely a morally inferior
sphere, but an unspeakably and inhumanly evil sphere, a culturally constructed and
imagined diabolic hell to which gays and lesbians must be compulsively exiled on the
same irrationalist mythological terms to which societies we condemn as primitive exiled
devils and witches and werewolves;’ homosexuals, self-consciously demonized (as devils)
as they are by contemporary sectarian groups, must be kept in the sphere consistent with
their inhumanity. 287 Gays and lesbians are thus culturally dehumanized as a nonhuman or inhuman species
whose moral interests in love and friendship and nurturing care are, in their nature, radically discontinuous with anything
recognizably human. The culture of such degradation is pervasive and deep, legitimating the
uncritically irrationalist outrage at the very idea of gay and lesbian marriage,8 which
unjustly constructs the inhumanity of homosexual identity on the basis of exactly the
same kind of vicious circle of cultural degradation unjustly imposed on African Americans
through antimiscegenation laws.289 Groups, thus marked off as ineligible for the central institutions of intimate
life and cultural transmission, are deemed subculturally nonhuman or inhuman: an alien species incapable of
the humane forms of culture that express and sustain our inexhaustibly varied search, as
free moral persons, for enduring personal and ethical meaning and value in living .
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
19
K of DAs – Future bad 2AC
Their disad impact calc enacts a paranoid temporality that is always trying
to save the present from the future – crushes transformative possibilities
Puar ‘7 (Jasbir, Women and Gender Studies @ Rutgers, Terrorist Assemblages p. xi-xii)
This project is thus profoundly impelled by an anticipatory temporality, a modality that seeks to catch a small hold of many futures, to
invite futurity even as it refuses to script it, distinct from an anticipatory "paranoid tern· porality" that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
critiques. Sedgwick writes of para- noia, "No time could be too early for one's having·already.known, for its having-already-beeninevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far in the future to need to be preemptively discounted. " 2 0
Paranoid temporality is thus embedded in a risk economy that attempts to ensure against
future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuber- ance-for we are never safe enough, never
healthy enough, never prepared enough-driven by imitation (repetition of the same or in the service of ¶
maintaining the same) rather than innovation (openness to disruption of ¶ the same, calling out to the new).
A paranoid
temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the
anticipatory temporalities that I advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of "politics
of the open end,"21 of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking
risks rather than guarding against them. In that sense it is also ensconced in an antedating temporality, an example
of which is as follows: "The runner's belief that he consciously heard the gun and then, immediately, exploded off the blocks is an
illusion made possible ... because the mind antedates ¶ the sound of the gun by almost half a second.""
That links them to the 1AC impacts – it’s fears for futurity that justify the
biopolitical policing of identity.– that’s impacted by Ajana (or Puar, if you’re
reading the short version, in which case “Panic over future consequences is gay
panic”). Their internal link chain reproduces the State’s disciplining of our
imagination
Dillon (Stephen, Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 2013 ("It's here, it's that time:" Race, queer futurity,
and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2013, vol. 23, No. 1, 38-51,
C.A.)
This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer
studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds
profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered
violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is
means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms
of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines
the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from
the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses
preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence,
and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing
the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an
anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
20
Future K - Extensions
All we have is now – prefer our standard of presentist politics over future
predictions
Dillon (Stephen, Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 2013 ("It's here, it's that time:" Race, queer futurity,
and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2013, vol. 23, No. 1, 38-51,
C.A.)
The Women’s Army not only understood themselves as inhabiting their future deaths – expecting to be killed or captured at any
moment – they also argued that if the present had a future, the future would never come. A future under the colluding rule of antiblackness, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy was a future the Women’s Army attempted undo by trying to bring an end to
the present. If there was to be a future there could be no present. And so, they pursued the destruction of the present in order to
usher in the future. Born in Flames argues for a confrontation with the future as a horizon of death through a politics of urgency
and presentism, but it deploys multiplicity and difference to challenge time as accumulation and capture. Within the feminist and
queer politics of Born in Flames, if the present is not enough, the future won’t be either. In this way, the critique of progress and
reform was also a critique of dominant conceptions of time based on passage not accumulation. Under the passing of time, the
future will be better because time undoes the brutality of power. The time of hope constructs the past as an aberration of
irrationality, lawlessness, cruelty, and backwardness, while the future is the past’s constitutive opposite. The future is where hope
resides. Yet, the critique of reform, revolution, and progress in Born in Flames understands time not as a passing, but as
modification, mutation, and transformation. Power does not get better, friendlier, or less brutal; it just changes name and shape.
The wreckage of the past keeps piling up, so that what the liberal imagination hopes it has left behind, is actually what makes the
present and the future unlivable. In the end, for Fanon, Jackson, and the Women’s Army the future may not come. And if it does, it
will be not be the warm illumination of queerness as it leads us to a more livable day; it will be the horrors of the past amplified
by the names equality, justice, and freedom. We might consider that queerness is not the futurity of an always-moving horizon;
rather, it is all we have now.
That’s key to checking the amnesia of whiteness and liberalism
Winnubst ‘7 (Shannon Winnubst, Associate Professor at Ohio State in the Department
of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, PhD in philosophy from Pennsylvania State,
Queering Freedom, 188-9)
But the map does not allow for this multiplicity of spatial locations or the impossible temporal simultaneity in which it stands. The
script of liberalism, which dominates the social map of phallicized whiteness, demands
static and demarcated locations, separable from others through clear and distinct
boundaries. One is either the oppressor or the oppressed: it makes no sense to be both
simultaneously. If one is going to claim both of these contradictory subject positions, one must at least claim them in a
temporal succession. But the queering of the “I” speaks from both, and often from many,
simultaneous subject positions on the map: the queer “I” does not suppress or repress
this multiplicity, even when it yields contradictory and thereby strictly nonsensical
utterances.¶ According to the map of power, for example, I should fight for the rights of gays and lesbians to be legally married.
This right would produce material benefits in my own life, securing the rights and privileges of heterosexuality for my own
relationship with my lover—e.g., the right to adopt children; the right to be insured through her employer or vice versa; the rights of
tax deductions; the rights of joint property ownership without the economic and psychological cost of endless legal paperwork; and,
perhaps most importantly, the right to hospital visitation. And yet I have argued against all of this. And I have done so without
offering any clearly demarcated future alternative that might assure us of the wisdom of foregoing this fight. Foolishness? Or queer?
As Michael Warner’s thorough diatribe against the politics of nor- malization shows,5 such may be the effects of a queering “I” that
emerges through the cracks of the misaligned social map of power. ¶ As Lugones points out, to perceive this misalignment requires acts
of memory: the spatial disorientation of simultaneously occupying apparently contradictory positions is also expressed in the differing
modes of temporality at work here. Bodies in power in the social map of liberalism deny their
privilege and power through “a lapse, a forgetting, a not recognizing oneself in a
description” (2003, 14) that may highlight differences within one’s allegedly contained and cohesive self. Locked into a
mode of fundamental self-deception, the oppressor cannot perceive the multiple subject
positions in which the social map of power locates him/her: he/she is an individual, not a
body with multiple subject positions scripted upon it. And subsequently, the body in power “does not
remember across realities” (2003, 14).¶ This refusal of memory can occur at multiple levels of our social psyches—from disavowals of
the deepest and longest histories to superficial and recent of lapses of recognition. Whether through a refusal to connect oneself to the
slave-owning whites of the mid-nineteenth century and all of their violence or a mundane disavowal of the impact of one’s
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
21
masculinity in interactions with colleagues, the body in power forgets the multiplicity of his/her subject positions and the multiply
different experiences into which they lead him/her. The disavowal of the past, whether one long ago or as recent as thirty minutes
prior, keeps the body in power intact. And facing the future obsessively, in turn, keeps this disavowal
of the past intact.6 The layers of denial multiply endlessly.7 As Jacqui Alexander writes of the U.S. regarding the 2000
presidential elections, “We live in a country apparently bent on inculcating a national will to amnesia, to excise certain pasts,
particularly when a great wrong has occurred” (2002, 94). Such amnesia plays itself out day to day and moment to moment in the
social map of phallicized whiteness’s power and its obsessive fixation on the future.¶ To call for a politics without a
future, therefore, must also be to call for a politics of the pasts, the lost pasts that were
silenced and erased by the forward march of univocal Progress. It is to frame experience through a
temporality of “what might have been,” rather than the dominant one of “what will have been.” Such a call, if they/we can
hear it at all, will render the masterful, free “I” of white bourgeois Christian subjectivity
vulnerable to the violences of the pasts—those pasts suppressed by the ahistorical
fortress of the liberal individual. It could also open possibilities of pleasure and freedom
that are unthinkable to us now: we cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, how
radically lives and ideas and worlds might change, if we were really to consider the ten
million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More strongly still, we cannot begin that dialogue and selfreflection without radically suspending the concept of the future that habitually structures our modes of thinking, tethering them to the
demands of utility and its politics of domination.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
22
A/T: Kritiks - Perm
Differential consciousness – or the ability to work across multiple identity
narratives and political contexts is key to trans survival and resistance
Spade ‘7 (Dean, founder of Sylvia Riveria Law Project and teaching fellow @ UCLA Law
School/Harvard Law School, “Methodologies of Transresistance,” A Companion to
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer studies, 247)
Differential consciousness as a mode of analysis offers us an option beyond the either/or
of equality vs. revolutionary, and hopefully could move us beyond the “sell- out/unrealistic idealist”
name-calling game. The differential offers a possibility for engaging in tactical resistance that releases activists from
overcommitment to the various truth claims underlying the other four positions outlined by Sandoval, instead focusing on
an underlying commitment to anti-oppression. Differential consciousness is particularly appealing given the conditions of
trans survival and trans activism that create conditions for shared analysis with US third-world feminists. Trans people
battle consistently against state violence, which both causes and results from our
disproportionate poverty and incarceration. As gender outsiders, trans people face lack of
recognition by the government, inability to access ID and other basic necessities that
permit employment, and misclassification in the shelters, group homes, jails and prisons
in which we are overrepresented.¶ The history of our resistance shows continual rejection from our
communities of origin and activist movements, being labeled as sexists with “male privilege” by some wings of white
feminism;37 being marginalized and erased as unassimilable by the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement; and
facing continued interaction with a medical establishment that seeks to disappear us either by denying us trans health
care or providing it on condition that we strive to pass as non-trans people post- transition.38 Trans survival
necessitates the utilization of multiple narratives about our identities , our beliefs regarding gender
and our bodies, our sexual practices and proclivities, our relationships to family, and the other information that culture continually demands or forces we alternately disclose and deny. We may be read as male on the subway, female at the
welfare office, male at the airport, female at the clinic, freakishly gendered in the prison, dangerously gendered in the
shelter. To survive our day-to-day interactions with the various institutions of power that
classify us dif- ferently and respond to us with simultaneous sexism and transphobia, in
addition to the racism, xenophobia, ableism, and ageism that the most vulnerable trans
people face, we are often required to alternate between varying and contradictory narratives about our own
experience and identity as needed. Sandoval describes how the differential emerges from the experiences of women of
color facing violence at the hands of the state and deftly resisting by utilizing multiple forms of consciousness. These
conditions resonate in many trans experiences, particularly the experiences of those who
are most overexposed to police and state violence and control: poor people, people of
color, immigrants, and incarcerated people.¶ Differential consciousness also fits into a broader picture of
trans survival in the context of activism. While differences regarding how gender should be viewed and discussed, why
people are transgender, and how transgender people should approach our lives and our stories exist and manifest in
much conflict in trans communities, trans activists are also familiar with working together across
these differences with other trans people who share common goals. I have worked in dozens of
trans activist spaces and campaigns where people who understood their identity through a post- modern gender
deconstructive frame worked closely with others who experienced being trans as a mental-health impairment as well as
others who understood their trans identity to be a genetic trait. The differences in these views (and so many others) can
certainly cause irreparable conflict on some issues, but frequently trans people with varying
understandings of gender and their own lives have been able to agree to a shared
narrative and strategy for accomplishing a goal that stood to benefit all trans people, such
as medical access, ID access, or increasing sensitivity and awareness in a key institution.
Additionally, we frequently are able to utilize these varying and con- flicting views as tactics to achieve the changes we
seek.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
23
A/T: Kritiks – Open Normativities
We should proliferate norms rather than reject them – 1AC engagement
with the state functions as an open normativity that is the prerequisite to
the K
Shotwell ’12 (Alexis, Sociology and Anthropology @ Carleton University, “Open
Normativities: Gender, Disability, and collective political change,” Signs: Journal of
Women Culture and Society 37:4
http://alexisshotwell.com/research_files/Signs%20preprint.pdf
Through contesting one normativity, new normativities might emerge, creating richer
contexts for knowing and being. As I will argue, if normativity can be understood as facilitating
a too-easy collapse of complex subjectivity into one or two “options,” forming new
orthodoxies is an important part of the collective work to forge more capacious and
diverse ways of being. Shaping new ways of knowing and being with altered criteria for what will count as
successfully meeting relevant norms – creating new normativities – opens the possibility for finding our bearings even in
the process of working to change the world. However, it may not be enough merely to shape new norms without criteria
for assessing them. “Open normativities,” then, names those normativities that prioritize
flourishing and tend toward proliferation, not merely replacing one norm with anothe r.¶
“Flourishing” may be the most contentious word in the previous paragraph. I follow Chris Cuomo in thinking that
flourishing is, fundamentally, well-being at the individual, species, and community level (Cuomo 62, quoted in Haraway
2008 134). Donna Haraway¶ grounds her appeal to an ethics of flourishing in Cuomo’s theory of ecological feminism.
Concerned with the entanglements between human and non-human animals, and our shared worlds, Haraway argues:
“multispecies flourishing requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences”
(Haraway 2008 90). So: well-being, ethical entanglements, and irreducible differences. But how to determine what counts
as flourishing, and what kinds of flourishing to pursue, is less clear. Haraway is not one to shrink from normative claims;
she says one should work “in a way that one judges, without guarantees, to be good, that is, to deserve a future”
(Haraway 2008 106). Elsewhere, she calls for an epistemological and ethical commitment to a “real” world, “one that can
be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in
suffering, and limited happiness” (Haraway 1991 187). When I use “flourishing” as a goal for open
normativities, I mean it to name the contingent, without- guarantees, partially-shared,
world that recognizes both ethical entanglement and irreducible difference. To judge that
something deserves a future is to make a normative claim : this, that judgement says, deserves to
continue.¶ Calling for open normativities and proliferation, under this conception of flourishing, does not mean that any
and all norms are to be pursued or even accepted – not everything deserves a future. Indeed, working to proliferate open
normativities will close down many norms. Creating open normativities as a collective/ nonvoluntarist
endeavor to proliferate flourishing means that norms that flatten complexity and close
down flourishing for others are rejected. As Simone de Beauvoir argues, if we take seriously the idea that
our freedom consists in willing an open future for ourselves and others, then we open freedoms to one another. It is
inconsistent to argue that freedom is taken from us if we are unable to oppress others; our freedom consists in willing
freedom for others, not only ourselves (Beauvoir 90).¶ Notice that “flourishing” will continue to be an undecided and inprocess norm. Norms that proliferate non-reductive flourishing for others are better than norms that harm them or deny
them well-being. SRLP’s work to open more possibilities for validation of gender change in state
identification documents is a good example of this. When state institutions restrict proper
identification to either people who have not changed gender or those who have undergone
very specific surgeries they instantiate a norm that closes down the prospects for
flourishing for those people who do not want or cannot have those surgeries. In contrast,
more varied criteria offer a still-imperfect and contingent set of possibilities that allow
more flourishing. If there were people whose idea of well-being consisted of denying trans people state
documentation, their norms would be closed down under this normative preference for proliferating flourishing not only for
more individuals but for more sorts of individuals, communities, and ways of being. ¶ Under conditions of
oppression, norms generally do not proliferate flourishing. Rather, they delimit and
constrain the ways of being one can take up, and they contribute to the death and
degradation of people who fall outside currently normative bounds – the further out of the
“normal,” the closer to death. Shifting norms is vital for the near-term work of making
worlds more livable for people currently imprisoned, deemed killable or unworthy of life,
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
and otherwise subject to diminishment of possibilities. SRLP’s policy and advocacy work
directly shifts the effects of norms on people and through those shifts to change the
norms themselves. There are also ways of directly engaging and changing norms from subject-positions of those
most oppressed by current social relations.
24
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
25
Gender normativity harms ext.
Real ID bad for LGBTQ – two reasons (1) asylums, and (2) drivers licenses
Spade ‘7 (Dean, founder of Sylvia Riveria Law Project and teaching fellow @ UCLA Law
School/Harvard Law School, “Methodologies of Transresistance,” A Companion to
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer studies, 247)
A second location through which to view the operation of these forms of resistance consciousness in queer and trans
politics is the passage of the Real ID Act in 2005. This new law is part of a slew of “War on Terror” law and policy changes
targeted to further marginalize and criminalize immigrants. It was passed amid a flurry of news coverage about how
terrorists could use false information to get driver’s licenses. The Real ID Act accomplishes two major feats worth
mentioning here. First, it increases
barriers to asylum applications. The Real ID Act changes the asylum
allow asylum officers to demand that an applicant get corroborating evidence of
their persecution from their home government. It also reduces the ability of judges to question the
asylum officers’ judgment of an applicant’s credibility, thereby making it harder for an
applicant who has been treated unfairly to successfully appeal .30 Additionally, the Real ID Act
functionally accomplishes the creation of a national identification card , a move too politically
unpopular to approach directly. It does this by creating uniform standards for Departments of Motor Vehicles
(DMVs) across the country, demanding that all states make their DMV IDs the same in order to have those IDs
process to
be treated as “federal ID” for the purposes of entering federal buildings, boarding planes, etc. The law creates federal
standards for what type of documents may be used to support an application for an ID and requires that states make
electronic copies of all the documents used to support the application. These electronic copies will then be part of a
national database available to law enforcement officials. The implications of these changes for queer and trans people are
especially significant. Asylum is an important avenue of immigration for many queer and trans
people who come to the United States after facing more severe violence and persecution
in their home countries based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Further, changes in ID that
reduce states’ ability to make their own rules and require the collection of documentation into a national database may
have a very significant effect on trans- gender people. Currently, DMV policies vary widely across the country regarding
sex designation change, often based on what kinds of state and local activism trans- gender advocates have been able to
accomplish. In some states, persons can change their gender on their DMV ID only if they can
demonstrate that they have undergone genital surgery. In others, they may change their ID if they can
show that they’ve changed a birth certificate. In others, only a letter from a doctor is required stating that
they are transgender and their license should be changed to reflect their current gender .
This patchwork of policies is unfair and arbitrary, and it endangers the safety and well-being of many
transgender people. However, it is far better than a national policy that, depending on how it is
implemented, might roll back rights and establish a national standard that comports with
the current worst state standards, or worse yet forbids sex designation change altogether.31 Further, the
placement of documents used in an application for a state driver’s license into a national database stands to have
significant implications for trans people, who often submit letters about very private medical treatment as well as
documents that list former identities as part of these application processes. For example, a person seeking a
driver’s license might submit a birth certificate that bears their old name and birth gender,
a name change decree from a court, and a letter from a medical provider or surgeon
discussing why their license should reflect a different gender than their birth certificate
reflects. Having all of this available to any state or federal agent who can swipe the
magnetic strip on the back of a license greatly increases the vulnerability of trans people
and reduces our ability to determine to whom we want to disclose our transgender
identities or histories. For many, the police are the people we would be most afraid to know this information about
us.32
National standards create additional barriers for transgender people
National Center for Transgender Equality - No Date
http://www.realnightmare.org/images/File/NCTE%20realid.pdf
The “so-called” Real ID Act (H.R. 418) contains a number of provisions of concern for our community. The first is its
impact on asylum applicants. The second is its requirements for new, uniform policies in regards to state
identification documents. While the bill may have originally been conceived from legitimate security concerns about
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
26
terrorists utilizing false identification documents, the resulting Act seems to do little more than a) scapegoat
immigrants, b) burden already over stretched state budgets, and c) likely create additional problems for transgender
people trying to legitimately acquire or change identification documents. Since the Act was only recently signed into
law, it is unclear what its exact effects will be. Clearly, it creates additional barriers for asylum applicants at the same
time that it narrows judicial review of administrative denials of applications. It also creates, for the first time, national
standards for state identity documents, moving us as close as the current political climate will allow us to a national
identity document. These national standards are likely to have unintended consequences for people seeking
identification that corresponds to their gender identity. Importantly, states have three years to comply with the
identification provisions of the Act; it does not in anyway invalidate identification you already have. Below, we detail some
of the possible and likely outcomes of this law and highlight the ways in which it could be used to harm our community,
intentionally or unintentionally. Transgender Immigrants Seeking Asylum Due to positive court decisions recognizing the
scope of persecution that transgender people face in countries around the world, asylum has become a very important
program for members of our community.
Additional requirements makes it increasingly hard for immigrants to seek
asylum
National Center for Transgender Equality - No Date
http://www.realnightmare.org/images/File/NCTE%20realid.pdf
Hundreds of transgender people who suffered persecution in their home country and/or who would suffer
persecution if they were returned to their home country have been granted asylum in the last five years. However,
following in the wake of negative actions taken by Congress in the mid-90s, the Real ID Act further narrows who can
qualify for asylum. The Act gives asylum officers broad discretion in requesting that “the applicant should provide
evidence which corroborates otherwise credible testimony.” In other words, the asylum seeker may be required to seek
proof of persecution from those in their home country who have been their persecutors. In the past, such
evidence was not necessary so long as the applicant was deemed credible by the asylum officer. For transgender
asylum applicants, this discretion could be particularly harmful. Most asylum officers do not receive training
about transgender issues and therefore are ill-equipped in evaluating a transgender applicant’s claim. Asylum
officers have been known to ask transgender applicants irrelevant questions about their sex lives or their
“coming out” experience (a concept that does not exist in all cultures or countries). The applicant oftentimes has a hard
time answering these questions due to their irrelevance or inapplicability. In a post-Real ID Act world, these offices will
be more likely to request corroborating evidence when the answers they get to these questions are not sufficient.
At the same time that officers are exercising this discretion, courts will have less power to review incorrect
decisions. The Real ID Act limits the ability of a judge to determine credibility for themselves unless the judge determines
that an applicant’s testimony is so strong that “a reasonable trier of fact is compelled to conclude that such corroborating
evidence is unavailable.” This standard is one that few, if any, applicants will be able to meet through testimony
alone.
Real ID compromises transgender immigrant rights
Gardon ‘9 (Felix, Co-founder Queers for Economic Justice, “The Real ID Act’s
Implications for Transgender Rights,” Women’s Rts. L. Rep. 352)
The implementation of the REAL ID Act also limited immigrants' access to basic services by
placing additional barriers in front of people seeking to join our communities. 4 Under the
¶
REAL ID Act, nine¶ categories qualify a person to get a basic identification card (such as a¶ driver's license), eight of
which are relevant to immigrants.5 A non-¶ applicant who is neither a citizen nor a national of the United States must¶
either be a: 1) lawful permanent resident (have a green card); 2) "conditional permanent resident" (marry a permanent
resident or have a¶ work visa); 3) resident of the United States asking to remain as a refugee or a refugee; 4) person who
applies from outside the country to come to the United States to stay; 5) person holding a "valid, unexpired non-immigrant
visa"; 6) pending applicant for asylum; 7) pending or approved applicant for "temporary protected status"; or 8) a pending
applicant for adjustment of status to that of an alien with permanent resident status. When you add to this conundrum the
binary of gender, the REAL ID Act completely derails the basic identification process because
applicants have problems with gender identification during the card application process ,
especially if the individual is gender non-conforming. If one of these basic identifications
is not consistent with the individual's other identifications , for example, the whole process
may be derailed. If a transgender individual's gender is not reflected correctly on a
Medicare card, the individual might not be able to access basic services, such as
hormones. Furthermore, if on a Social Security card gender differs from name, this inconsistency immediately may
inhibit access to services. The bureaucratic machine might stop benefits until there is accord between name and gender.¶
Presently, in my experience, transgender community members seeking these services are
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
27
predominantly illegal immigrants. These illegal immigrants frequently lack forms of
identification and the opportunity to obtain identification because they are from another
country. They moved from oppressive conditions abroad to the United States with little¶ documentation and are
attempting to address this lack of documentation in order to get access to basic services in the community.¶ As an
example, one of these immigrants is a Cuban refugee who has been in the United States for many years and has recently
undergone gender transition. Currently, with all the Department of Homeland Security reform, she is having trouble
gaining access to basic services because her case documentation has been lost, including the processing of her refugee
status. As a result, she is likely to lose her refugee status while her case is pending because of her gender and name
change. She cannot even access her identification and change her gender, which would continue to allow her to get
medical services. Presently, all of her medical services are being withheld while she attempts to get her basic status
changed. With the passage of the REAL ID Act, many foreign documents that were
previously used to get identification are no longer acceptable. This means that foreigners'
birth certificates may not be accepted as valid identification at the Department of Motor Vehicles
("DMV"). 8 This is not standardized across the United States, so each state has implemented different regulations to
address the issue of identification.9 As a result of these differing state regulations, people in the transgender community
have been denied the opportunity to obtain services.¶ A new system, The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement ¶
("SAVE") Program, provides check-ups for an individual's employment¶ status as well as an immigrant's status to
determine whether the immigrant¶ is eligible for aid, services, and public assistance.10 Transgender individuals
may have trouble finding employment if employers utilize this¶ electronic means of
checking whether an individual is a legal immigrant.¶ Furthermore, there is a growing backlog at the
immigration services due to¶ the Department of Homeland Security name checks.I I Immigrants in general are
consistently disadvantaged due to the backlogs. 12
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
28
Harms – Gender Neutral IDs
Real ID blocks state level gender neutral IDs
Haynes ’13 (James, Indiana University School of Law, “Identification Problems and
voting Obstacles for Transgender Americans,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social
Equality
http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=ijlse)
State governments are theoretically currently free to create gender-neutral¶ identification cards in order to avoid the
problems associated with changing gender designation markers. However, a federal law currently threatens to preclude
states from issuing such cards in the future. The REAL ID Act (“REAL ID”) was signed into law by President George W.
Bush on May 11, 2005,56 ostensibly to better protect American citizens from terrorist attacks.57 Among other things,58
REAL ID requires states to include a gender designation marker on identification cards if
the cards are to be eligible for use for federal purposes.59 REAL ID also sets minimum requirements for documentation
that must be presented before such an identification card can be issued.60 These minimum requirements are as follows: ¶
(A) A photo identity document, except that a non-photo identity document is acceptable if it includes both the person’s full
legal name and date of birth. (B) Documentation showing the person’s date of birth. (C) Proof of the person’s social
security account number or verification that the person is not eligible for a social security account number. (D)
Documentation showing the person’s name and address of principal residence.61 ¶ Note that the minimum documentation
requirements do not necessarily require a photo identity document or any proof of an individual’s gender. So even though
REAL ID seeks to require gender designation markers on all identification cards eligible for federal use, it does not seek to
require any proof of an individual’s gender at the time the identification card is issued. The fact that REAL ID would allow
an individual to obtain a state identification card without requiring photo identity documentation or proof of gender
suggests that gender may not actually be an important factor in tracking and identifying people. Though REAL ID went
into effect on January 15, 2013, states that are not in compliance with it will receive deferment of enforcement for at least
six months.62 After the deferment period, the U.S. Department of Human Services is currently planning to announce a
schedule for phased-in enforcement no later than fall 2013.63 Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that a state
would take any meaningful steps toward the creation of gender- neutral identification
cards with the possibility of forced compliance with REAL ID on the horizon.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
29
Harms – Detention
Detention causes health disaster through denial of services
Turney ’11 (CT, Comments Editor @ UCLA, “Give me your Tired, your Poor, your
Queer,” Law Review 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, Lexis Nexis)¶
In imprisonment contexts, the physical care transgender detainees seek most often is
hormone therapy; surgery - while important to many transgender people - is simply not a realistic goal
during incarceration and detention. n114¶ The provision of adequate medical care for all
immigrant detainees is a consistent problem in ICE facilities. n115 ICE has established few
standards for providing medical care to detainees. The ICE Performance Based National Detention Standards
(Standards) states that detention facilities are expected to provide an initial medical screening (including mental health
and dental screening); primary medical, dental, and mental health care; emergency care; and specialty health care. n116
These terms are not further defined, nor are standards set for what is considered an adequate level of care to give to
detainees. n117 The result of these vague standards is a pervasive failure to provide [*1363]
minimally adequate health care to detainees throughout the immigrant detention system, a
problem that has slowly gained media attention and consequent public awareness. n118¶ Given these threadbare
standards for and resulting obstacles to obtaining medical care, it would be unsurprising if a transgender
detainee faced difficultly obtaining hormone therapy or other transitional care. n119 ICE has
established no standards related to the provision of transitional treatment to transgender detainees, n120 although an ICE
official has asserted that ICE will provide hormone therapy to detainees who have undergone "sex reassignment surgery."
n121 Despite this apparent policy, it is likely that a detainee will have to lobby extensively for such
care with the assistance of a legal representative. n122 Given the uncertainty surrounding such basic
medical care as antibiotics, n123 provision of hormones to post-operative transgender detainees is bound to be
uncertain.¶ Even if one assumes that this guideline is followed, the standard leaves many transgender
detainees without appropriate hormone therapy due to its reliance on "sex reassignment
surgery" as the predicate for the provision of hormone therapy. For several reasons, a large
number of transgender individuals, both citizens and immigrants, receive hormone therapy without having undergone any
surgical treatment. First and foremost, the overwhelmingly dominant treatment model in the United States generally calls
for hormone therapy well before surgery. n124¶ [*1364] For others, even though they may desire and be eligible for
surgical transitional treatment, it is simply not a realistic option. Many transgender people lack health
insurance, and for those who have it, most insurance does not cover surgical transitional
treatment. As a result, many transgender people cannot afford hormone treatment through
standard medical routes, let alone surgery. n125 In the immigration context, surgical treatment may be
particularly unattainable for many individuals seeking entry, depending on the availability of medical services and the risks
involved in obtaining treatment in their country of origin (and thereby exposing their identity). n126 For still others, surgery
may not be needed, is not physically possible, or is not desired. n127 Nevertheless, people in any of these
situations may be taking hormones, either formally through a prescription, or informally
buying hormones on the street. n128 However, under the standard described above - that of having undergone
"sex reassignment surgery" - none of the people in these situations would be eligible to receive hormone therapy while in
detention. Detainees who are already on hormone therapy at the time of detention, whether prescribed or not, can suffer
from severe withdrawal if hormone therapy is abruptly stopped, including "emotional lability, undesired regression of
hormonally-induced physical effects ... [a] sense of desperation that may lead to depression, anxiety and suicidality ...
psychiatric symptoms and self-injurious behaviors." n129 While the Standards have requirements that detainees be
evaluated for chemical dependencies and potential withdrawal issues, no mention is made of potential withdrawal from
hormones. n130¶ The other aspect of care that poses particular problems for transgender detainees relates to their mental
health. Therapy, counseling, or other mental health care is often a critical need for many transgender individuals,
particularly in lieu of physical transition when such transition is neither possible nor desired, as is often the case in
detention. n131 As noted above, mental health care is needed for detainees who have been forced to abruptly stop
hormone [*1365] therapy. Yet, access to mental health care is another area in which ICE detention facilities have been
found lacking. n132 Prior to 2008, ICE had no specific standards for the provision of mental health care to detainees.
n133 Despite now having standards that require facilities to have an available in-house or contracted mental health
provider, provide initial screenings determining whether referral to a mental health provider is necessary, and to ensure
receipt of services within fourteen days of any referral, n134 detainees continue to be denied access to adequate mental
health care. n135¶ At the same time that they are likely being deprived of adequate mental health care, transgender
people often face increased mental stress from the detention environment. In many prison and detention contexts,
government officials respond to a transgender person's requests for evaluation and treatment by insisting that the person
does not require any treatment, insisting that the person's gender identity issues are not "real." n136 Further, government
officials often require the person to adhere to dress codes and codes of conduct required for the person's birth sex, and
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
30
continue to refer to the person by their birth name and pronouns corresponding to their birth sex. n137¶ The
denial of
identity that results from such deprivation of hormone therapy, medical treatment, and
respect for the detainee's identity can have devastating impacts on detainees. In the
prison context, undergoing years of such denial has led prisoners to suicide attempts,
self-mutilation, and self-castration. n138 While this may not be as significant of an issue for detainees who
spend only a short time in detention, some detainees - especially applicants for asylum - spend years in detention. n139
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
31
Asylum– adverse credibility
Real ID lowers the standard of adverse credibility, effectively barring
anyone with inconsistent statements from asylum
Scavone ’13 (Heather, Director of Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic and Prof of Law
@ Elon University Law School, “Queer Evidence: The Peculiar evidentiary burden faced
by asylum applicants with cases based on sexual orientation and identity,” Elon Law
Review 5, 400-401)
Prior to the enactment of the REAL ID Act in May 2005, it was in the discretion of the IJ to make a
finding of adverse credibility where “inconsistent statements, contradictory evidence, or
inherently improbable testimony in view of the background evidence on country conditions”50 went “to the
heart of the alien’s claims.”51 Additionally, the finding of adverse credibility had to be supported by “specific,
cogent reasons” that “bear a legitimate nexus to the finding.”52 Prior to the enactment of REAL ID, “[a]dverse credibility
findings based on ‘speculation or conjecture rather than evidence in the record [were] reversible.’”53 In practice this
meant that as long as an applicant’s inconsistent testimony was peripheral to the central,
core elements of his claim, such inconsistency would not result in a finding that the
applicant was not credible.¶ When the REAL ID Act was enacted, however, a number of significant changes
were made to the judicial process of finding adverse cred- ibility. Significantly, a new standard was promulgated governing
credibility determinations.54 Subsequent to May 11, 2005, an Immigra- tion Judge can make an adverse credibility
determination “without regard to whether an inconsistency, inaccuracy, or falsehood goes to the heart of an applicant’s
claims.”55 While one might conclude that it is reasonable to expect asylum applicants to be consistent even in the minute
details of their claim, practitioners know that even the most credible, bona fide accounts of persecution can contain
inconsistencies that do not undermine an applicant’s credibility.56 Numerous asylum applicants suffer from
psychological conditions such as post- traumatic stress disorder, which can significantly
impair an applicant’s recollection of a precise timeline. Similarly, in the case of an asylum applicant
who is illiterate, written dates may have no significance to that individual in terms of the chronology of his or her account.¶
One case that illustrates this new standard in practice is Grijalva v. Gonzales, an unpublished case from the Sixth
Circuit.57 Grijalva’s
claim for asylum was based on his membership to the particular social
group of obviously effeminate gay men in Guatemala.58 He testified that the multiple and
brutal instances of persecution that he endured prior to coming to the United States were on account of
his notably effeminate appearance, which made him a target for violence by the police.59 Among the incidents that
Grijalva described were routine beatings by the police, which occurred on an almost weekly basis for over two years, and
a three-day detention and gang-rape by thirty or more Gua- temalan soldiers.60 The IJ found that Grijalva
lacked credibility primarily due to fact that he inconsistently testified that the gang-rape
occurred in 1994, whereas his written asylum application indicated that the rape happened
in 1990.61 The psychiatrist who diagnosed Grijalva with post-traumatic stress disorder also testified that Grijalva had
listed 1990 as the date of the rape, and presented evidence that it is a cultural norm in Guatemala to use life events rather
than calendar dates to explain when an event has occurred.62 Despite the fact that “the IJ was convinced that Grijalva
[was] an effeminate homosexual and observed that homosexuality had been recognized as a ‘particular social group’ . . .
he found that Grijalva lacked credibility.”63 The IJ’s adverse credibility determination was based primarily on a single discrepancy in the timeline of the applicant’s narrative, even though he acknowledged Grijalva’s MPSG status.64 Under
the old standard for ad- verse credibility, the IJ would have had to support this finding with an
explanation of how the single, temporal discrepancy went “to the heart of the [Grijalva]’s
claims.”65 Subsequent to enactment of REAL ID, the mere existence of a discrepancy
appears to be enough to facilitate judi-¶ cial findings of adverse credibility.¶ Due to the new and
slackened standard for finding adverse credi- bility, an adjudicator need not consider the literacy, psychological
impairment, or culture of an applicant in order to find that she lacks credibility. According to the new language of REAL ID,
the finding may be based on a single inconsistency, often insignificant to the over- all cohesiveness of an applicant’s
account.66 As such, REAL ID has made it easier for IJs to conclude that an asylum applicant is not credible, resulting in
failure of that applicant’s claim.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
32
Adverse credibility
Multiple cases reveal that Real ID increases judges’ capacity to determine
queer identity via subjective assessments of “demeanor”
Scavone ’13 (Heather, Director of Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic and Prof of Law
@ Elon University Law School, “Queer Evidence: The Peculiar evidentiary burden faced
by asylum applicants with cases based on sexual orientation and identity,” Elon Law
Review 5, 405)
The Grijalva, Shahinaj, Mockviciene, Razkane and Todorovic cases are indicative of the outcome-determinative impact
that the REAL ID amendments to the INA have had in regards to the trial court finding of credibility or adverse credibility,
which we have seen is crucial to the success of an asylum applicant’s claim. While it is clear that the amended
standard puts all asylum applicants at greater risk of being deemed not credible, the risk
to applicants with sexual orientation and identity claims is arguably even greater. By
considering the adverse implications of REAL ID in conjunction with the previously examined evidentiary preference for
documentation over testimony, the chances of success for asylum applicants with sexual
orientation and identity claims begin to look dire.¶ Perhaps more so than any other subgroup of asylumseekers, MPSG claims of asylum based on sexual orientation or identity suffer from groundless IJ findings of adverse
credibility that reek with prejudicial bias. I submit that for asylum applicants whose claim is based on
sexual orientation or sexual identity, the likeliness of receiving an ini- tial determination of
“adverse credibility” by the IJ is even higher than with other groups, due to the IJ’s ability
– courtesy of REAL ID – to justify the finding with subjective criteria, such as the applicant’s
“demeanor” and “candor,” which are criteria that easily lend themselves to the expression of bias.83
More evidence
Scavone ’13 (Heather, Director of Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic and Prof of Law
@ Elon University Law School, “Queer Evidence: The Peculiar evidentiary burden faced
by asylum applicants with cases based on sexual orientation and identity,” Elon Law
Review 5, 405)
The case of Shahinaj v. Gonzales is a sobering example of how the REAL ID’s
incorporation of the word “demeanor” into the credibility assessment can lead to clearly
biased adverse credibility findings.71 Shahinaj’s claim for asylum stated that he had suffered
past persecu- tion in Albania due to his homosexual orientation, and that he feared future
persecution if he was forced to return to Albania.72 The IJ made a finding of adverse credibility because
“neither [Shahinaj’s] dress, nor his mannerisms, nor his style of speech [gave] any
indication that he [was] a homosexual.”73 While it would seem that this claimed justification by the IJ for his
finding of adverse credibility would be clearly deemed as illustrative of prejudicial bias on appeal, the BIA adopted the IJ’s
opinion and affirmed his ruling.74 The Eighth Circuit ultimately remanded the case, on the grounds that the IJ’s adverse
credibility determination was tainted by bias.75 Even in consideration of the Eighth Circuit’s recognition of the erroneous
finding, however, it is clear that the specific vocabulary implemented by the REAL ID Act –
demeanor, candor, and responsiveness – opens the door to IJ subjectivity in the crucial
finding of credibility.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
33
Privacy
Real ID evidentiary burdens destroy privacy for asylum seekers
Scavone ’13 (Heather, Director of Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic and Prof of Law
@ Elon University Law School, “Queer Evidence: The Peculiar evidentiary burden faced
by asylum applicants with cases based on sexual orientation and identity,” Elon Law
Review 5, 412)
It seems a great irony that for many asylum
applicants who likely spent the better parts of their
lives trying to conceal unfavorable sexual orientation or identity from persecutory forces ,
they are ultimately denied refuge in the United States because they are not sufficiently able to
convince the powers that be that they are that which they have been trying to hide at all cost.
Sexual orientation and identity are fundamental to personal identity. They are central to the most
intimate aspects of human existence. That any individual should have to bare these core
elements of private identity in a courtroom, to be scrutinized and adjudicated, is at least
uncomfortable and, at worst, violative of their personal privacy. The irony is compounded by the fact that the
often painful testimonial evidence extracted in the courtroom is consistently deemed by immigration judges to be of little
probative value. For asylum applicants with claims based on sexual orientation or identity, the enactment of the REAL
ID act in 2005 served to further complicate this already oppressive evidentiary burden.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
34
Solvency
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
35
Solvency – Queer/LGBT Agenda
Status quo LGBT assimilation politics threatens surrender queer dissent to
the State’s closed horizon – opening immigration debate key to challenge
homonationalist narrative
Olson ’14 (PhD Candidate @ UM Amherst, “Quer(y)ing Permanent Partnership,”
http://journals.cortland.edu/wordpress/wagadu/files/2014/07/3-THREE-Olson-3.htm)
In elucidating the limitations and costs that this kind of legislation perpetuates, this intervention first aims to disrupt the
broader teleological narrative of inclusive equality advanced by professionalized advocacy groups who shape the
discursive and strategic field of action for immigration activism. I suggest that LGBT assimilation (under the banner
of equality) into
an exclusionary immigration apparatus that has historically (re)produced a
matrix of inequality works to perpetuate these exclusions, reify the authority of the state to
define kinship, and preclude the political affiliations necessary for re-framing questions of
national membership and belonging. To this end, I am concerned with exploring how homonational
narratives have been mobilized by and for queer binational couples in ways that promise the
(re)production of obedient neoliberal citizens and would-be citizens and, accordingly, a dampened
political activism. I argue that the category of “permanent partner” constructs a set of these homonational subjects: patriotcitizen and alien-partner, discursively designed to fit the bill. To make this claim, I take several analytic steps. First, I
examine the language of the UAFA, asking how the production of “permanent partnership” (re)produces differing levels of
vulnerability between and among U.S. citizens and immigrants. In short, what categories of in/dependence and norms of
citizenship are re-iterated and of the permissible, desirable and deserving human being promoted-more broadly?
Secondly, I analyze the discourses and campaign tactics deployed by those supporting the legislation, as well as the
stories of binational couples, asking how these work collectively to produce a patriotic narrative of obedience and
discipline and an equal rights frame that de-centers the immigrant. Third, I consider how these kinds of homonational
discourses, particularly in such a complex political moment for queers within the nation,
might work to re-enforce the power of the state to authorize what counts as kinship and to
define national belonging: What sets of exclusions might be advanced and what possible alliances might be
precluded, by these single-axis identity-based strategies? What tensions between and within subordinated
groups might be exacerbated by relying on the state’s authority to legitimate a new class
of acceptable human while continuing to ignore the plight of other queer and non-queer
legal residents, asylum-seekers and undocumented immigrants, many of whom already live, work,
love and/or have created kinship networks in the United States?¶ Finally, and particularly in light of the recent overturning
of DOMA, my hope is that this kind of intervention might caution against an overly
celebratory and uncritical embrace of this burgeoning homonational moment. Instead, I ask
how a queer analytic lens might direct us away from continued political advocacy work that
participates in the exclusionary harms of neoliberal governance, and towards alternative
practices of citizenship. What fissures in the nationalist architecture of normative rules of kinship, as well as
broader values demanding contestation, might the discourses around the UAFA legislation reveal and, accordingly, how
might immigration and/or queer activists seize upon these apertures as sites of potential coalition moving forward?
We’re key to the movement because we reject the homonationalist impulse
that queers are “secure”
Olson ’14 (PhD Candidate @ UM Amherst, “Quer(y)ing Permanent Partnership,”
http://journals.cortland.edu/wordpress/wagadu/files/2014/07/3-THREE-Olson-3.htm)
As Jacqui M. Alexander
argues: “If the very terms upon which we organize are constituted
through the ideology of the secure citizen- the very construct that the state deploys to position the loyal
patriot- then we will continue to make invisible the widespread detention of immigrants and
their criminalization and the ways these ‘work’ to secure the mythic secure citizen”
(Alexander, 2006, p. 229). Thus, instead of relying upon obedient interventions like the UAFA, preserving the
normative principles of citizenship and immigration while reifying the state’s ability to
regulate its membership, how might we begin thinking toward practices that depend less
on an uncritical “desire for the state’s desire”? (Butler, 2004, p. 105)? I am not suggesting that binational
queer couples, or other currently excluded populations, should not take advantage of the overturning of DOMA or of sole
legislative initiatives like the UAFA (should it pass in the future). What I am insisting is that we must simultaneously begin
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
36
to challenge rather than only make the choice to belong to these normative discourses that construct our divisions
(Chavez 2012).¶ I argue that a queer analytical lens-a queerness that differs profoundly from the well-funded
public voice of LGBT professional advocacy groups- may
assist in theorizing practices that resist
relying upon the state and in this way resist actively dispossessing or subordinating other
subjects. For Michael Warner, “’queer’ rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple
political interest representation in favor of more thorough resistance to regimes of the
normal” (Warner, 1999, p. xxvi), placing an emphasis on transformation rather than
accommodation. Cathy Cohen has also argued that the “radical potential of queer politics” allows us to forage for
those “interconnected sites of resistance from which we can wage broader political struggles” (Cohen 1997, p. 441).
Importantly, for Cohen this difficult work of coalition does not entail collapsing our histories
or
equating our struggles but rather finding commonality in our “shared marginal
relationship to dominant power that normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges ” while it “largely
dictates our life chances” (p. 440). In what follows, I provide a few examples of efforts to rethink political activity
surrounding immigration activism without relying upon “sacrificial victims for its achievement” (Elshtain, 1981, p. 301).
Must resist real ID – center on the lives it makes difficult or impossible to
live
Olson ’14 (PhD Candidate @ UM Amherst, “Quer(y)ing Permanent Partnership,”
http://journals.cortland.edu/wordpress/wagadu/files/2014/07/3-THREE-Olson-3.htm)
What political opportunities might be gleaned by pairing state-authorization with the queer experience of civic strangeness
in order to resist strategies that rely upon the disciplining production of “obedient” immigrants? Additionally, what sorts of
affinities might emerge when the paradigm of kinship is exposed both as shared site of struggle and in dire need of
interrogation? Might diverse forms of queer and immigrant relationships that challenge the
current paradigm of heternormative, and increasingly homonormative, kinship offer
alternative narratives about political affiliation (Phelan, 2001, p. 80)? The organization Queers for
Economic Justice provides an initial template for thinking through these possible connections. In opposition to
Immigration Equality’s reliance upon the affective draw and institutional legitimacy of an established family reunification
discourse, QEJ’s “Vision Statement” (which has been circulated around the websites of various local grassroots
immigration groups) first advocates for a expanded definition of kinship ties; current definitions,
the statement avers, abandon “those who do not define themselves within conventional
relationships like marriage or conjugality” (QEJ, 2012). Secondly, they argue, the current definition of
family in immigration law excludes not only the larger family structure of “aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, nieces
and nephews, siblings…” as well as ‘the broad universe of non-heteronormative family units created by LGBTQ
immigrants” (QEJ, 2012). Beyond challenging this narrow definition of family reunification, the discourse strategically
emphasizes the rights of whom the UAFA discourses ignore: those of the immigrant herself.¶ Rather than simply
expanding existing rights, QEJ explains the immigration system itself as “constructed,”
“tiered,” and classist” and thus centers its work upon the “undocumented worker.” As a
result, part of their mission entails battling the Real ID Act, which mandates that all states
comply with Homeland Security’s regulations (DHS, 2012) and fighting for public benefits for individual
immigrants. Finally, in underscoring the detrimental impact of “policing the border,” QEJ’s narrative implicitly works to
contest a neoliberal discourse of responsibility; pointing instead to the state’s irresponsible criminalization policies and
border militarization, the QEJ holds the government accountable for increased violence against people of color and
countless deaths. In this way, by centering the question of whose lives are made difficult or
impossible to live, the QEJ vision statement serves what Judith Butler calls the “critical
function” of “scrutinizing the action of delimitation itself” (Butler, 2004, p. 107).
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
37
Solvency - Gender Neutral IDs
Repeal of Real ID key to eliminate gender requirement
Haynes ’13 (James, Indiana University School of Law, “Identification Problems and
voting Obstacles for Transgender Americans,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social
Equality
http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=ijlse)
Additionally, REAL
ID should be repealed or amended so that it does not require states to
include gender designation makers on state identification cards, preferably before the
federal government begins forcing compliance with it. The necessity of a gender designation
requirement for the purposes of properly identifying individuals has not been shown,83 and REAL ID would serve
to prevent states from creating gender-neutral IDs as a way to address the problems faced
by transgender Americans. In addition to making life more difficult for transgender individuals by requiring gender
designations on state identification cards, REAL ID is opposed by immigrants, seniors, racial minorities, and low-income
Americans for the increased difficulty it imposes on obtaining important identification documents.84 As of 2009, the ACLU
reported twenty-five states that had passed statutes or resolutions denouncing or prohibiting the implementation of REAL
ID.85
Repeal key to gender neutral IDs
McGrath ‘9 (James, Professor of Law @ Texas Weslyan School of Law, “Are you a boy
or girl? Show me your real ID” Nevada Law Journal 9: 405-6)
What is undeniable is that gender
and sex are not truly binaries, and laws treating them as such
are antiquated. Social and legal conventions have followed our medical discoveries in the past, and must continue to
evolve to reflect the world as we better understand it. Knowing the fallacy of sex and gender binaries, requiring a
gender identifier as a matter of federal law on all state issued identification cards is hardly
a rational approach to ensuring the accurate identification of people in an effort to thwart
future terrorist threats. The requirement that gender be an identifier on identification cards
should be eliminated from the REAL ID Act to allow states the freedom to delete this
inaccurate and problematic biometric from their official identification cards. This reform would
be meaningless if states do not also amend their identi- fication card requirements to delete a gender identifier from their
official identification cards. States should make genderless identification cards available to citizens now to avoid most of
the harsh effects of inclusion of a gender identi- fier on certain sexual minorities. These identification cards would be valid
for most uses, except for federal purposes (such as entry to federal property and airports). Repeal or amendment
of the REAL ID Act would make those genderless identification cards as “real” as any other
official identification card.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
38
Solvency – Testimony burdens
Should redraft testimony burdens in Real ID
Scavone ’13 (Heather, Director of Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic and Prof of Law
@ Elon University Law School, “Queer Evidence: The Peculiar evidentiary burden faced
by asylum applicants with cases based on sexual orientation and identity,” Elon Law
Review 5, 413)
It is not clear whether asylum law has evolved with such apparent disfavor towards this vulnerable sub-set of asylum
seekers through cold calculation or through passive inattentiveness. It is quite clear, how- ever, that affirmative steps must
be taken to lessen the evidentiary bur- den on these applicants – at the very least to bring the burden within the realm of
feasibility. Rather than habitually discounting testimonial evidence as marginally probative, Immigration Judges should
acknowl- edge federal regulations, which proscribe that in an asylum claim “[t]he testimony of the applicant, if credible,
may be sufficient to sus- tain the burden of proof without corroboration.”127 In the absence of an explicit finding of
adverse credibility, IJs should give full weight to credible applicant testimony without requesting corroborative evi- dence
of sexual orientation. Finally, the provisions of the REAL ID Act that relate to judicial
determinations of adverse credibility should be reviewed and redrafted to require that this
crucial finding be based on specific, articulable, and objective reasons by the IJ, rather
than on applicant “demeanor” or peripheral inconsistencies in applicant testimony.128 To
continue to evaluate asylum claims based on sexual orientation and identity under the
present judicial framework would be to acquiesce to the unjust denial of relief in numerous
compelling cases. Such acquiescence is unacceptable and inconsistent with the democratic ideals of this country and with
the American notion of justice.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
39
Topicality
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
40
T- Substantial
REAL ID pretty substantial
Behreandt ‘7 (Dennis, Founder and Editor of American Daily Herald, “Pushing National
IDs: Congress tried its best to shackle the nation with a national ID,” The New American
July 9)
Others have since echoed Congressman Paul's concerns and have added their own. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) has been similarly critical, stating that Real ID creates a dangerous national ID that will facilitate
government surveillance of law-abiding citizens. "Once the IDs and database are in place,"
EFF warns, "their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance
activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a
host of government services and been co-opted by private companies to create massive databases of personal
information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because 'common machine-readable
technology' will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to
easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts."
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
41
T – Its
Real ID uses states to accomplish federal surveillance
Behreandt ‘7 (Dennis, Founder and Editor of American Daily Herald, “Pushing National
IDs: Congress tried its best to shackle the nation with a national ID,” The New American
July 9)
The resolution passed by the state of Arkansas pulls no punches in its assessment of the threat posed by the Real ID Act.
The Arkansas measure notes: "The 'common machine-readable technology' required by the
REAL ID Act of 2005 would convert state-issued driver licenses and identification cards into
tracking devices, allowing computers to note and record a person's whereabouts each time he or she is identified."
The Arkansas resolution also points out that the Real ID Act "wrongly coerces states into doing the
federal government's bidding by threatening to refuse to the citizens of non-complying
states the privileges and immunities enjoyed by the citizens of other states."
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
42
T – Surveillance
Real ID is a federal surveillance mandate
Harper ’14 (Jim, Director of Information Policy Studies @ Cato Institute, “Real ID: A
state by state update,” Policy Analysis, 749, 5/12/14,
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa749_web_3.pdf)
In 2005, Congress
passed a law seeking to create a national identification (ID) system by
weaving together the states’ driver-licensing systems. Accord- ing to the federal government’s plan,
within three years state motor-vehicle bureaus would begin issu-¶ ing driver’s licenses and identification cards according
to federal standards, and data about drivers would be shared among governments nationwide. States across the
country rejected this unfunded federal surveillance mandate . Half the state legislatures in the country
passed resolutions objecting to the REAL ID Act or bills outright barring their states from complying. Almost a decade
later, there is no national ID, but Congress continues to funnel money into the federal government’s national ID project.
The federal government has spent more than a quarter billion dollars on REAL ID
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
43
Neg
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
44
Legalism K Link
Legalistic solutions are antiqueer – by granting breathing room for marginalized
bodies they reherse the State’s performative of granting humanity while ignoring
the fact that it is constituted by extralegal antiqueer violence
Stanley, 11 – President's Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego (Eric. "Near Life, Queer
Death Overkill and Ontological Capture." Social Text 29.2 107 (2011): 1-19)X
The problem of privatizing violence is not, however, simply one of the re-narration of the incidents. The
law, and
argues to be the safeguard of liberal democracy, is one of
the other motors that works to privatize this structural violence. Rights are inscribed, at least in the
specifically “rights” dis- course, which
symbolic, with the power to protect citizens of the nation-state from the excesses of the government and against the
trespass of criminality. In paying attention to the anterior magic of the law, it is not so much, or
at least not only, that some are granted rights because they are human, but that the
performative granting of rights is what constitutes the promise of humanity under which
some bodies are held. This is important in thinking about the murder of Brazell, and about antiqueer violence at
large, because it troubles the very foundations of the notion of protection and the formative violence of the law itself.
According to the juridical logic of liberal democracy, if these rights are infringed upon, the law offers remedy in the name
of justice. This necessary and assumptive formal equality before the law is the precursor for a system argued to be based
on justice. In other words, for the law to lay claim to something called justice, formalized equality
must be a precondition. The law then is a systematic and systematizing process of substitution where the singular
and the general are shuttled and replaced to inform a matrix of fictive justice.¶ Thus for the law to uphold the
fantasy of justice and disguise its punitive aspirations, antiqueer violence, like all
structural violence, must be narrated as an outlaw practice and unrepresentative of culture
at large. This logic then must understand acts like the murder of Brazell in the sin- gular. Through a mathematics of
mimesis the law reproduces difference as similarity. By funneling the desperate situations and multiple possibilities into a
calculable trespass kneading out the contours and the excess along the way, equality appears. To acknowledge the
inequality of “equality” before the law would undo the fantastical sutures that bind the U.S. legal system. In the hope of
being clear, for the law to read antiqueer violence as a symptom of larger cultural forces, the punishment of the “guilty
party” would only be a representation of justice. To this end, the law is made possible through the
reproduction of both material and discursive formation of antiqueer, along with many
other forms of violence. I too quickly rehearse this argument in the hope that it might foreclose the singular
reliance on the law as the ground, and rights as the technology, of safety.23
They constrain our political imagination to law, which forecloses other
possibilities of change – aftermath of slave emancipation proves
Kandaswamy 12 (Priya, ' Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Mills College, "THE
OBLIGATIONS OF FREEDOM AND THE LIMITS OF LEGAL EQUALITY",
SOUTHWESTERN LA W REVIEW, vol 41)
Despite a vast array of critiques that have elucidated the ways in which the U.S. state is deeply invested in maintaining
social relations of racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, it is still quite commonplace to assume that to
remedy social injustices one must turn first to the law . The pursuit of legal equality is frequently
understood as the most pragmatic approach and a necessary first step to any kind of broad scale social change. In
practice, however, legal equality struggles have failed to deliver substantive social justice for
many groups. Frequently written off as a sign of the incompleteness of legal change, these
failures are often invoked as evidence of the need for further legal reform rather than
prompting the serious consideration of the law's actual capacity to effect change that
perhaps they should. Even those critical of legal strategies frequently fall back on them, citing legal reform as a
necessary evil, the best that can be achieved in the current political context, or the first step toward broader changes. In
this way, the
law maintains a fierce hold on the political imagination. In this essay, I argue for the
importance of severing that hold. The assumptions that legal reform is a pragmatic and necessary first step to social
justice is a reflection of the boundaries that circumscribe what is imagined as politically possible within dominant discourse
rather than the essential truths they are often taken to be. To the extent that legal interventions will
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
45
always simultaneously reinforce the legal authority of the U.S. state, legal reform is bound
to reiterate rather than transform unequal distributions of power. Pinning political possibilities to the
law circumscribes the boundaries of change in very narrow ways. Instead, movements for social justice must seek to open
up possibilities for transformation and evaluate their engagements with the law in terms of the [*266] future possibilities
those engagements might open or foreclose. In other words, rather than presume legal equality is the answer, it is
necessary to engage with the more complex questions about what freedom should and could look like and locate legal
interventions in relation to this broader vision.¶ In order to illustrate these points, I turn first to the historical example of
emancipation and the consequent conferral of citizenship to formerly enslaved people, a quintessential moment in the
expansion of legal rights in U.S. history. I look to Reconstruction Era struggles over the meaning of citizenship specifically
because they mark a particularly defining moment in the reconfiguration of racial violence through the construct of the
liberal subject. Given the ways that U.S. citizenship had been defined against blackness, the Fourteenth Amendment's
extension of citizenship rights to freed people forced the nation to grapple with what racially inclusive citizenship in a
nation forged through racial violence would look like. Therefore, considering the legacies of this historical period raises
crucial issues for contemporary struggles for inclusion, equality and the extension of legal rights, particularly given the role
emancipation has played as an important historical reference point for these struggles. ¶ Emancipation marked a
moment of great possibility, and freed people held broad and diverse visions of freedom that included
reparations, land ownership, freedom of mobility, and other self-defined mechanisms of individual and collective selfdetermination. n1 However, as Saidiya Hartman shows, legal recognition as citizens worked to
constrain and curtail these more expansive possibilities of freedom by locking freedom for
black people into an idiom defined by obligation, indebtedness, and responsibility. n2 Rather
than mitigate the significance of racial difference in the national imagination, the conferral of citizenship rights collaborated
in "the persistent production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious"
n3 and obliged freed people to shoulder the responsibilities and burdens of perpetually having to demonstrate their
preparedness for and deservingness of citizenship in a context where their blackness marked them as otherwise. n4 This
was evident [*267] in the ways that state institutions prioritized enforcing labor and sexual discipline amongst freed
people. n5 As the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau's Assistant Commissioner Orlando Brown wrote, if freed people were to be
citizens, it was necessary "to make the Freedmen into a self-supporting class of free laborers, who shall understand the
necessity of steady employment and the responsibility of providing for themselves and [their] families." n6
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
46
Cap K Link
AFF normalizes trans bodies within neoliberal capitalism – repealing Real
ID forecloses critique of how trans people are imbricated within broader
capitalist structures
Irving, 8 - Ph.D. Political Science (York), Professor at Carleton University who focuses on Transgender Studies (Dan, "Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the
Transsexual Body as Productive," Radical History Review)
Transsexual individuals can be viewed as viable neoliberal subjects: they have proven to be flexible and fluid, self-sufficient, and major
contributors to their families, workplaces, communities, and societies. To many, emphasizing
the normative potential
of transsexuality has been a successful strategy to counter the marginalizing effects of
pathologization. The legitimizing of the transsexual worker, how- ever, does not offer
serious challenges to heteronormativity, nor does it illuminate the conditions of
hyperexploitation that structure neoliberalism. In fact, these narratives dovetail with hegemonic discourses
concerning the upstanding citizen and the necessity of entrepreneurialism.65 The interest expressed by major corporations such as IBM
demonstrates the ease with which capital continues to appropriate the oppressed minorities, such as sex/gender variants, into its
accumulation strategies. As part of its “managed diversity” programs, IBM actively recruits trans people, racial minorities, Native Americans,
gay men and lesbians, and women.66¶ The changing tides of neoliberal restructuring amid the continuation of the heteronormative
sex/gender binary has created a receptive atmosphere for transsexual incorporation into the productive spheres of capital. Unlike medical
experts such¶ ¶ as Cauldwell who chastised nonnormative sex/gender identifications as frivolities that distracted from one’s
potential as a laborer, corporate executives view these ten- uous identifications as advantageous to present regimes of accumulation.
Difference is appropriated not only as a market niche but also as a resource for capital accumulation when transsexual bodies are valorized
socially because of the value their labor contributes to the economy. As explained to members of sex/gender minori- ties by IBM, “When
you join IBM’s diverse team you are encouraged to share your unique perspectives and capabilities. At IBM we recognize individual
differences and appreciate how these differences provide a powerful competitive advantage and a source of great pride and opportunity in
the workplace and marketplace.”67¶ Toward Radical Futures¶ Much
like modern gay and lesbian movements
that have veered away from liberationist approaches toward assimilatory goals,
transsexuals have overwhelmingly responded to pathologization and erasure by
cultivating social subjectivities that demonstrate their ability to contribute to economic
progress. However, claims to self-sufficiency, morality, and a positive work ethic undermine the potential for a politics of resistance
and create fractures within transsexual communities based on class, race, citizenship status, and ability (to name a few). Whose bodies are
the most productive and most effortlessly absorbed into capitalist employment pools? Appeal- ing to mainstream society through a
rearticulation of dominant socioeconomic dis- courses comes at a cost to those within trans communities who cannot be easily assimilated
into normative categories, such as those who do not pass as men or women or those who are physically or mentally ill or incarcerated.¶ A
second division resulting from these assimilatory strategies extends beyond transsexual communities. This strategy within the context of
neoliberalism distances transsexual people from other economic outsiders who are also configured as parasitic, abnormal, or deviant.
Progressive trans scholars and activists ought to think through the complex ways that
heteronormativity and capitalism impact the lives of many other individuals who are
understood as improperly sexed/gendered such as single mothers, women and men of
color, those on social assistance, and those engaged in sex work. Further, these efforts to normalize
trans bodies as productive forego the possibility of establishing alliances with anticapitalist and antiglobalization activists who engage in
queering all facets of political economy. While the urgent need for employment is deniable for many trans people, it is important to ask:
Whose interests are ultimately served by the formation of dutiful, self-sufficient, hardworking transsexual subjectivities?¶ Certainly, the
lasting legacy of the medicalization of trans people demands our continued resistance. We
also need to acknowledge the
ways in which neoliberal prescriptions for thought and behavior have influenced the lived
experiences that contribute to trans theory and activism despite transsexuals’ rich history
of mili-¶ tant opposition to systemic power structures. The actions of the trans and gendernoncompliant Compton Cafeteria rioters and of those who fought police at Stone- wall ought to occupy a more significant place in the queer
collective memory. In the midst of a political climate in which we are told that “there is no alternative,” their activism can still spark radical
imaginations of a queer future.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
47
Homonationalism Link
Privacy rights for trans people is homonationalist
Beauchamp ‘9 (Tony, Gender and Woman Studies @ UC Davis, “Artful Surveillance
and Strategic Visibility: Transgender bodies and the US state of surveillance after 9/11,”
Surveillance and Society 6.4, 362-3)
While arguing for privacy rights may benefit some gender-nonconforming employees, this
strategy assumes equal access to privacy and legal recourse for all transgender people
and fails to consider how privacy rights are compromised or nonexistent for
undocumented immigrants, prisoners, and individuals suspected of terrorism, who may or
may not be transgender-identified or perceived as gender- nonconforming. Diminished rights to privacy are particularly
evident in the wake of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, legislation that provides much of the ideological and legal foundation
for more recent state surveillance measures. Building on earlier policies such as the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Death
Penalty Act and the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities, the USA PATRIOT Act further limits individual privacy rights by
expanding the federal government’s ability to secretly search private homes; collect medical, financial and educational
records without probable cause; and monitor internet activity and messages. Passed in the flurry of anti-immigrant
nationalism and increased racial profiling that followed 9/11, the Act bolsters particular understandings of the relationships
between citizenship, race, privacy and danger that underpin surveillance measures like the Real ID Act and SSA nomatch policy. Though absent from the NCTE statement, this context demonstrates the frailty of any claim to privacy rights,
particularly for trans and gender-nonconforming immigrants and people of color. The statement seeks to protect
transgender employees, but remains within – and is limited by – the constraints of the current medico-legal
system. That medico-legal system itself works to track and document gender-nonconforming
bodies and transgender identities, such that at some level, trans people’s medical and
legal information was never private or privileged. With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that the
primary strategy of transgender advocacy and activist groups has been to advise trans
individuals to make themselves visible as transgender to authorities that question or
screen them at places like airports and border checkpoints. In response to the DHS Advisory, The
National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) released its own security alert to transgender communities, warning
that given the recent Advisory, security personnel may be “more likely to commit unwitting abuses” (National Transgender
Advocacy Coalition 2003). NTAC suggests that trans travelers bring their court-ordered name and gender change
paperwork with them, noting, “while terrorists may make fake identifications, they won't carry name change documents
signed and notarized by a court.” The organization recommends strategic visibility as a safety precaution, urging those
who might otherwise be “going stealth” to openly disclose their trans status to state officials and to comply with any
requested searches or questionings. Calling the potential violence and violations against travelers “unwitting abuses”
suggests that authorities enacting these measures cannot be blamed for carrying out policy intended to protect the
general public from the threat of hidden terrorism. Such a framework neatly sidesteps any broader
criticism of the routine abuses of immigrant, Arab and Arab- appearing individuals that
have been justified in the name of national security, and implicitly supports the state’s
increased policing of “deviant” or apparently dangerous individuals. The demand for trans
people to make themselves visible as such is couched in terms of distinguishing between
the good, safe transgender traveler and the dangerous, deviant terrorist in gendered
disguise. This distinction rests on an implicit understanding of trans travelers as
compliant and non-threatening, yet such status is only made possible through the linking of
deviance to bodies outside of the white middle-class norm, as Somerville and others have
demonstrated. In other words, it is only by effacing the particular scrutiny leveled at trans people
of color and trans immigrants that the figure of the non-threatening trans traveler
emerges. This figure is imagined to be scrutinized on the basis of gender alone, such that medical and legal
documentation are assumed to be a readily available and comprehensive solution. Such a move simultaneously entails
displacing the racialized elements of state surveillance onto the figure of the terrorist, implicitly marked as both racialized
and non-trans in the logic of NTAC’s statement. Moreover, by avoiding any larger critique of state surveillance or policing,
NTAC also positions itself as a non- threatening, safe, even patriotic organization.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
48
K Alt – Abolition
Instead of reforming the broken system – we should orient ourselves
toward abolition of the prison industrial complex of which 1AC harms are a
part. Abolition is an ethic that reorients the conversation
Stanley, 11 – President's Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego (Eric. Captive Genders
“Introduction,” pp. 7-8)
Living through these forms of domination are also moments of devastating resistance where people working together are
building joy, tearing down the walls of normative culture, and opening space for a more beautiful, more lively, safer place
for all. Captive Genders remembers these radical histories and movements as evidence that our legacies are fiercely
imaginative and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute of times.11¶ In the
face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolition—and specifically a trans/queer
abolition—is one example of this vital defiance. An abolitionist politic does not believe that
the prison system is “broken”¶ and in need of reform; indeed, it is, according to its own logic, working
quite well. Abolition necessarily moves us away from attempting to “fix” the PIC and helps us
imagine an entirely different world—one that is not built upon the historical and contemporary legacies of the
racial and gendered brutality that maintain the power of the PIC. What this means is that abolition is not a response to the
belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough. Although we do believe that the PIC is horrible and that
reform is not enough, abolition radically restages our conversations and our ways of living and
understanding as to undo our reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For us, abolition is not
simply a reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that makes the PIC impossible. To this end, the time of abolition is
both yet to come and al- ready here. In other words, while we hold on to abolition as a politics for doing anti-PIC work, we
also acknowledge there are countless ways that abolition has been and continues to be here now. As a project
dedicated to radical deconstruction, abolition must also include at its center a reworking
of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender normativity as
measures of worth.12
Abolish immigration-detention centers – don’t just fix the pipeline leading
to them
Olga ’12 (Third year Law Student @ Berkeley, “Immigration Reform is a Queer & Trans*
Human rights issue” http://www.autostraddle.com/immigration-reform-is-a-queer-transhuman-rights-issue-151082/)
Current U.S. immigration laws are broken and unjust. Like in all other racialized systems
of control, such as mass incarceration, the drug war, and surveillance of people receiving
public benefits, queer and trans* people suffer and will continue to suffer
disproportionately. The only way that we as queer and trans* activists can fight against homophobia and
transphobia as it impacts the most vulnerable members of our community is through working in coalition with other social
justice groups to fundamentally change and dismantle these unjust systems. Repealing DOMA is not enough.
We need to fight for a comprehensive immigration reform that will: recognize relationships
beyond marriage for immigration purposes; eliminate the one year bar on asylum,
mandatory criminal record exclusions, automatic deportation proceedings for those
denied asylum, and disqualification of previously deported people from asylum; grant
legal status to the millions of undocumented people who have made their homes in the
U.S.; and abolish the inhumane and unacceptable immigration detention system.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
49
Alt Causes
Alt causes for transphobic violence – housing, police, workplace
Huffington Post, 06/03/2015; Transgender People Are More Visible Than Ever, But It's Still Legal To
Discriminate Against Them In Most States, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/03/transgender-discriminationlaws_n_7502266.html
Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover was met with an outpouring of love and acceptance. Jenner
gained a million Twitter followers in just over four hours, outpacing even President Barack Obama, and thousands
tweeted #CallMeCaitlyn to show their support. But not every trans woman gets a hashtag. Though Jenner's coming
out marks a huge moment for trans visibility in the mainstream media, daily discrimination and
violence is still the norm for thousands of transgender Americans. The rate of violence against
transgender women, especially transgender women of color, is alarming -- according to a 2013 report by the
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, an organization working to reduce violence against LGBTQ
people, 72 percent of victims of anti-LGBTQ homicide were transgender women, and 89
percent of victims were people of color. According to the same report, transgender people
were also more likely to experience violence at the hands of law enforcement. Trans people in
general experience higher rates of HIV, higher smoking rates and more suicide attempts than the general population,
according to a 2011 report by the National Center for Transgender Equality. They also face more
discrimination and harassment when seeking health care. One-fifth of people who identify as
transgender have reported being homeless at some point in their lives. It's not surprising there are so many health and
safety issues in the transgender community -- in many places, particularly in southern states, there aren't laws
to protect them from housing or workplace discrimination , and hate crime legislation is nonexistent or
doesn't include Trans people as a protected group.
Alt cause – voter identification laws
Haynes ’13 (James, Indiana University School of Law, “Identification Problems and
voting Obstacles for Transgender Americans,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social
Equality
http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=ijlse)
With such requirements in place, transgender voters may experience obstacles and discrimination at the voting booth.71
For example, if a transgender woman shows her photo identification with a male name or gender designation marker, poll
workers may have questions about her identity. These questions may be justifiable because the identification does not
seem to match the voter.72 However, the NTDS recently reported that forty percent of transgender
individuals polled reported experiencing harassment when presenting gender-incongruent
identification.73 So a voter, fearing the public attention that a poll worker might bring to the voter’s transgender
identity and the harassment that might follow, may rather stay away from the polls on Election Day.74¶ Supporters of
voter photo identification laws argue that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but a
2007 study by the Brennan Center for Justice determined that one person impersonating another at the polls is “an
occurrence more rare [sic] than getting struck by lightning.”75 For example, in the 2004 general election, only 0.0004% of
the votes cast in New Jersey were the result of voters knowingly casting invalid votes, none of which would have been
prevented by the use of a photo identification requirement.76 Similar studies were conducted in other states, yielding
comparable results.77 According to the Brennan Center study; clerical or typographical errors, bad matching, voter
mistakes, and election officials jumping to conclusions are more likely explanations for the perceived prevalence of voter
fraud than actual fraud on the part of voters.78 Given the extremely low prevalence of voter fraud,
people should not be presumed to be engaging in fraud simply because they are currently
going through gender transition or because their state will not allow them to change the
gender designation marker on their identification.
Alt cause – bullying
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
50
Bullying has no place - harris. (2012, May 30). Bray People Retrieved from
http://ezproxy.augsburg.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1018544856?acc
ountid=8430
ICKLOW Fine Gael TD Simon Harris has said it is time to recognise there is no place in our
society for violence and discrimination. Deputy Harris was speaking on International Day
Against Homophobia and Transphobia, the theme of which was 'Combatting Homophobia
In Education and Through Education' He said: ' You don't have to be gay to be the victim
of homophobic bullying. Harassment like this can have a huge impact on the life of young
people, resulting in poor academic performance and even early school drop-out,
destroying their self-confidence, and occasionally causing long-term psychological
distress. It is not just students who can be the victims of this kind of targeting, teachers
can also be affected. Irish attitudes are changing and we must build on the progress being made by
fostering a tolerance of all people from an early age through education. Organisations in Ireland, such as
BeLong To, which has recently launched it's "Stand Up" campaign against homophobic bullying in schools,
are working hard to focus attention on this issue and to ensure a safe and more accepting school
environment for our young people.'
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
51
States CP Solvency
Only state level action solves for steps already taken by department of
motor vehicles
Harper ’14 (Jim, Director of Information Policy Studies @ Cato Institute, “Real ID: A
state by state update,” Policy Analysis, 749, 5/12/14,
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa749_web_3.pdf)
Although REAL ID is moribund, a state-by-state review reveals that some states’ legislatures have back- tracked on their
opposition to the national ID law, and in some states motor vehicle bureaus are quietly moving forward with REAL ID
compliance—contrary to state policy. Surprisingly, in some states, motor vehicle bureaucrats are working to
undercut state policy opposing REAL ID and the national ID system.¶ If the United States
is to avoid having a national ID, all states should cease implementation of REAL ID, the
federal government should stop funding REAL ID efforts, and Congress should repeal this unwanted national ID law.
MDAW 2015
Real ID Gendernormativity
52