Trans liberation under neoliberal governmentality: An argument against rights-based activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1980s, the increasing institutionalization of the North American gay and lesbian rights movement drastically shifted the goals and methods of 2SLGBTQIA+ activism. Organizations began to focus on achieving access and equality through dominant institutions (such as military service and hate crime legislation) with the goal of achieving “equal citizenship,” rather than challenging the foundational inequalities embedded in such institutions. Despite the issues with this kind of approach, contemporary trans resistance is often expected to replicate this framework and make similar demands for trans-specific human rights and legal protections. This article argues that a rights-based approach to trans liberation cannot succeed under the current iteration of biopolitical governance in the United States. Inspired by Henry Giroux’s concept of the biopolitics of disposability, the author suggests that contemporary neoliberalism devalues trans lives (especially the lives of racialized trans women and femmes) to such an extent that they are viewed as expendable. Therefore, 2SLGBTQIA+ advocacy that seeks to gain further transgender rights and legal protections from a state that views trans lives as expendable should be abandoned in favour of activist projects that address the most urgent issues facing the most vulnerable trans people, such as employment assistance programs, access to inclusive healthcare, decarceration, and prison abolition projects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".