For trans people seeking government benefits, this process of appeasement now includes extensive municipal, state, and federal paperwork that requires one to secure a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria (the term endorsed by the American Psychological Association and indexed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to describe a trans person’s sense of possessing a gender identity that fails to match up to the sex their were assigned at birth), and in many cases undergoing state-required gender-affirming surgeries (procedures required by many states to confirm one’s ‘transition’ to the ‘other’ sex: for trans people living under these regimes of sexual control, these requirements amount to state-sanctioned coercion regarding their bodily, reproductive, and sexual autonomy). They must also possess enough class and social status to access medical and legal establishments to find allies in the process of filing required paperwork, be able to afford to do so, and then find a willing clerk to process document changes. This bureaucratic process of becoming “fathomable” to the administrative system often takes months if not years. Moreover, its successful completion is contingent upon the ways a handful of individuals — from nurses to doctors, from benefits clerks to lawyers — read the text that is the body of a queer or trans person. This effort to compartmentalize queer bodies into a predetermined set of gender and sexual boxes is the analog of physical and verbal violence deployed against queer and trans people to compel them to police their own behaviors, appearance, and mannerisms. Pressure to articulate one’s identity in terms that make sense to the state is a historical artifact of the modern age. The origins of this process of “making oneself known” to the state dates back to the late 1800s and the birth of demographics as a field of social science research. With the human population beginning to skyrocket in the nineteenth century, economists began to create models to predict the ways population growth might sustain or outpace agricultural growth and the impact those shifts might have for productivity. (See, for instance, the now-disproved studies of Robert Malthus on overpopulation.) As these concerns around the economic viability of increasingly balkanized nation-states were folded into studies of military readiness, estimates of military-aged males, and the first population censuses, the modern study of demographics was born. Over time, social scientists came to use studies of “the population” to justify policies of sexual repression, eugenics, and racial oppression so as to protect the health of the social body (i.e. “the nation”). The increasingly scientific nature of these efforts was not purely objective, however. As Spade writes, “Foucault helps us understand how producing stateness through population-level programs (including taxation, military conscription, social welfare, education, immigration) always entails the mobilization of ideas about what kind of life must be promoted and what kind of life is a threat and must be left out, rooted out, or extinguished.” Queer and trans people have long found themselves on the losing end of that formulation and have therefore grown weary of attempts by institutions — particularly institutions invested with power by the state. Hence, under the current U.S. state apparatus, it is within these administrative bureaucracies that queer people — particular trans people as well as queer and trans people of color — can expect to encounter the most difficulties in obtaining their rights. For those seeking to design systems that acknowledge queer and trans peoples’ unique way of world-making, the question must become not just how do we build mechanisms of service-provision that reach LGBTQ people living at the margins, but how do we do so in ways that allow for the self-definition of those in question. Theorists may present inclusivity in their work but still contend with the fact that, as Spade has it, “Trans people are told by the law, state agencies, private discriminators, and our families that we are impossible people who cannot exist, cannot be seen, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere.” My concern here around categorization isn’t so much an argument against a redistributive welfare state arrangement so much as a caution to those without a substantive critique of social democracy. My hope is that, by bringing this critique to bear on theories to be formulated under the banner of the creation of “next system” designs, proposals might come to center queer and trans voices in new and innovative ways. For now, it remains true that any political or economic system that derives its sense of economic justice from the administration of particular benefits must then contend with this difficulty: how can a state take concrete steps to ensure those at the margins receive adequate care without coercing them into a particular way of being? Dig, Root, Grow

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