The Gender Matrix: On the Prohibitions Against Intersexuality and Transsexuality

“It may be precisely the partiality of a text which conditions the radical character of its insights. Taking the heterosexual matrix... as a point of departure will run the risk of narrowness, but it will run it in order, finally, to cede its apparent priority and autonomy as a form of power. This will happen within the text, but perhaps most successfully in its various appropriations.”

—Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, xxvii (1993)

IN Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (GT), Judith Butler intervenes in psychoanalytic thought by placing a prohibition on homosexuality before the incest taboo. Prohibitions on incest and homosexuality constitute the psychic fabric of what Butler calls the “heterosexual matrix” and in more recent work the “gender matrix” (Butler and Honneth 2021, 41, 43). While much rightly has been made of the common misreading of performativity as volitional performance in the years since GT’s publication, I argue misreading the heterosexual matrix as, well, heterosexual, is of similar proportion and damage. This shorthand inadvertently blunts its continued explanatory power; rearticulating this concept as the “gender matrix” may restore to it that power.

What Butler does not explicitly say but incipiently acknowledges in GT is that, before even the prohibition on homosexuality, there are two additional taboos: the taboos on intersexuality and transsexuality.¹ These four prohibitions or taboos²—on intersexuality, transsexuality, homosexuality, and incest (in that order)—psychically undergird the gender matrix. GT provides the theoretical ground allowing me to identify two additional taboos against intersexuality and transsexuality, but Butler explicitly names the taboos on only incest and homosexuality. In their 1999 preface to GT, Butler says: “If I were to rewrite this book under present circumstances I would include a discussion of transgender and intersexuality... I would also include a discussion on racialized sexuality and, in particular, how taboos against miscegenation (and the romanticization of cross-racial sexual exchange) are essential to the naturalized and denaturalized forms that gender takes” (Butler [1990] 1999, xxvii).³ The gender matrix is not the only matrix of power at work, nor is it transhistorically or transculturally consistent. Although transsexuality and intersexuality may not have been described by Butler in terms of prohibition and taboo, their appearance and articulation in and through this matrix of power requires our attention. An expanded definition of the “gender matrix” that includes the prior prohibitions on intersexuality and transsexuality clarifies its relevance and scope, casting into relief contemporary debates on queer identity politics, abortion, trans and intersex healthcare, and the management of childhood gender—debates that all refract through contested religious language and belief.

THE “HETEROSEXUAL MATRIX” AND ITS OTHER NAMES

Butler defines the “heterosexual matrix” in a footnote to the opening chapter of GT as

that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” to characterize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.” (Butler [1990] 1999, 151n6)

The second chapter, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix,” investigates the concept. Butler argues that gender identification occurs through the melancholic incorporation of prohibited desires. These melancholic structures of identification only come to be and to make sense within the context of an already-instantiated heterosexual matrix.⁴ This matrix, the articulation of which is inspired by Wittig and Rich, allows—or rather demands, as an operation of power—us to normatively and consistently define and identify “men” and “women.”⁵ Simultaneously, it is the very system out of which an understanding of “desire” can emerge. In the process, “the cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot “exist”—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not “follow” from either sex or gender” (Butler [1990] 1999, 17). The heterosexual matrix therefore enables certain kinds of identifications while excluding the possibility of others. Indebted to Foucault, Butler argues the matrix’s productivity never quite conforms to its mission: exclusion from it enables other modes of affiliation and identification. The “persistence and proliferation” of those affiliations and identifications that “cannot” properly exist but do anyway “provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender” (Butler [1990] 1999, 17). The heterosexual matrix is one of many possible (and extant) matrices of gender, and Butler aligns its identification and critique with “the political project to enlarge the scope of possible gender configurations” (Butler [1990] 1999, 38). Such enlargement includes a desired future matrix motivated by what they call “post-genital politics” (Butler [1990] 1999, 26).⁶

Butler has many names for this diffuse cultural matrix in and after GT. Besides “the heterosexual matrix,” the concept is called the “cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible” (Butler [1990] 1999, 17); “heterosexual matrix for conceptualizing gender and desire” (Butler [1990] 1999, viii); and “culturally imposed standards of gender integrity” (Butler [1990] 1999, 67) in GT. In Bodies That Matter, Butler employs “the matrix of gender relations” (Butler 1993, xvi, xvii) and “a gendered matrix of relations” (Butler 1993, xvi). In a recent conversation with Axel Honneth, Butler uses “gender... as a matrix of subject formation” and, finally, its shortest and most precise rendering, “the gender matrix,” in a maneuver I read as meant to prevent a nonspecialist from “underreading” the term’s explanatory power (Butler and Honneth 2021, 41, 43). These many overlapping names show that even in constructing the original definition of the “heterosexual matrix,” this ideological, politico-cultural formation exceeds the terms of heterosexuality.

This matrix is key to not only the development and enforcement of heterosexuality but also the varied gender configurations that emerge in heterosexuality’s shadow and orbit. Butler shows heterosexuality itself is rarely about mere heterosexuality: they note “there has been little effort to understand the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame” (Butler [1990] 1999, 57). This is one of Butler’s most powerful, if occasionally overlooked, interventions: “The melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame” is, simply, another name for the heterosexual matrix. Although the heterosexual matrix’s successful operation (though never fully or singularly successful) may result in avowed heterosexuality, that very heterosexuality is psychically conditioned by the melancholic incorporation of refused homosexual desire. Understanding this matrix as concerning only or predominantly “heterosexuality,” devoid of repressed and incorporated homosexuality, stifles its explanatory value. Butler’s most recent, shortest name for the concept identified first in GT as the heterosexual matrix—the “gender matrix”—might be its most proper (if you forgive the word) in continuing to think with and through GT.

TABOOS OF THE HETEROSEXUAL GENDER MATRIX

After defining the heterosexual or gender matrix, Butler narrates its operation through melancholic incorporation—the basis for gender identification. As noted earlier, Butler sees taboos against incest and homosexuality as foundational to the development and continued enforcement of the gender matrix. Butler in GT leads us through the concept’s presence in the work of Freud (as the very foundation of culture), Lévi-Strauss (for whom “incest... is not a social fact, but a pervasive cultural fantasy” [Butler [1990] 1999, 42]), and Lacan (who “focuses on the prohibition against incest and the rule of exogamy in the reproduction of culture... the Law which forbids the incestuous union between boy and mother initiates the structures of kinship, a series of highly libidinal displacements that take place through language” [Butler [1990] 1999, 43]). Whether the incest taboo is “actually” foundational to culture (whatever that means) is immaterial—and not only because searches for origins inevitably turn up empty and usually disguise conservative political aims.⁷ That so many disciplines (including the study of religion) coalesce around this concept such that our discursive (and) psychic terrain is “incestrally” (pronounce it like ancestrally) loaded shows the hold the incest taboo maintains on us. As Butler says, “That the prohibition exists in no way suggests that it works. Rather its existence appears to suggest that desires, actions, indeed, pervasive social practices of incest are generated precisely in virtue of the eroticization of that taboo” (Butler [1990] 1999, 42). Its “generativity” interests this Foucauldian Butler, a generativity that “inadvertently produces a variety of substitute desires and identities that are in no sense constrained in advance” (Butler [1990] 1999, 76). Butler then examines the peculiar impossibility of homosexuality in the “heterosexualized and masculine” uptake of the incest taboo in Western thought (Butler [1990] 1999, 49).

Butler can skillfully tease out the heterosexist base of the incest taboo in part because such ground was tilled by Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Women” (Rubin 1975). Rubin articulates the mutual imbrication of taboos on incest and homosexuality in a proto-Foucauldian critique of structural anthropology’s shortcomings yet maintains a sense of sex as prediscursive and prior to gender. Rightly critical of Rubin’s commitment “to a distinction between sex and gender which assumes the discrete and prior ontological reality of a ‘sex’ which is done over in the name of the law, that is, transformed subsequently into ‘gender,’” Butler provides the more robust rendering of the mutual imbrication of the taboos on incest and homosexuality (Butler [1990] 1999, 74).⁸ They also provide the tools to identify the two additional taboos central to the understanding of the gender matrix I seek to forward—those of intersexuality and transsexuality—while, nonetheless, remaining constrained to the terms Rubin lays out.

First, Butler names the obvious missing piece of Freud’s narrativization of the Oedipal complex, making it impossible to square with his commitment to primary bisexuality: “With the postulation of a bisexual set of libidinal dispositions, there is no reason to deny an original sexual love of the son for the father, and yet Freud implicitly does” (Butler [1990] 1999, 59). For Freud these bisexual libidinal dispositions are described in terms of masculine and feminine, active and passive, respectively. If the son desires the father, it must be his feminine disposition. But need that always be the case? Butler asks provocatively:

How do we identify a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition at the outset? By what traces is it known, and to what extent do we assume a “feminine” or “masculine” disposition as the precondition of a heterosexual object choice? In other words, to what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire? (Butler [1990] 1999, 60)

In this final sentence, “the desire for the father” exists without immediately indicating who is doing the desiring. Butler does not specify “the desire for the father of the son,” leaving desire for the father without a subject. This second “son’s” absence can show us that inasmuch as the son is assumed to be “dispositionally feminine” for desiring the father—inasmuch as we may, unprompted, supply that additional phrase to the final sentence—that same assumption is silently made of the daughter. Put another way, the daughter’s relation to the father is thought to be either masculine in disposition and take the form of identification, or feminine and take the form of desire. These terms are not so easily separable. What if, for instance, that daughter were to exhibit masculine desire toward the father? Does that daughter then become the son, or the father the mother?

Butler elucidates that “the dispositions Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates discrete gender identity and heterosexuality” (Butler [1990] 1999, 64). The Child’s desires, described as either “masculine” or “feminine,” are a function of a predetermined matrix demanding subjects “be” a given gender and desire the “other” of the two genders.⁹ Butler says this much. However, Butler does not go so far as to spell out that, even before the Child’s desire is described in gendered terms, the Child themself is described in gendered terms. The Child is already interpellated, before the ability to heed that call, as either “boy” or “girl.” It is that predetermination, reliant on a stable and binary conception of gender such that if the boy is once boy he will always be boy, that must form the ground from which masculine and feminine dispositions are then issued.

Might we say then that sexuality reveals itself to always already be gender, just read in relational terms?¹⁰

Butler shows that “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition,” and heterosexuality is the manifestation of the melancholic incorporation of homosexual desire (Butler [1990] 1999, 63). However, Butler does not attend to the Child’s already-given, purportedly proper gender beyond noting that the heterosexual matrix makes it so. Thus, a crucial correlation is lost: it is the melancholic incorporation of transsexual desire that manifests in the nontranssexual (what we often call “cisgender”¹¹).

Although Butler misses this connection, it is out of this analysis of melancholic incorporation in heterosexuality that Butler’s only extended reference to transsexuality in GT comes:

Transsexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual pleasures and body parts. Very often what is wanted in terms of pleasure requires an imaginary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that one might not actually possess, or, similarly, pleasure may require imagining an exaggerated or diminished set of parts. The imaginary status of desire, of course, is not restricted to the transsexual identity; the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object. The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself. Indeed, in order to desire at all it may be necessary to believe in an altered bodily ego which, within the gendered rules of the imaginary, might fit the requirements of a body capable of desire. This imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on which it works. (Butler [1990] 1999, 70–71)

Clearly (at least to this reader), the relationship between transsexual desire and nontranssexuality (and vice versa) is on their mind, remaining prominent in their 1999 preface. However, the language remains inchoate, and this lack of clarity—perhaps conditioned by the text’s historical-cultural moment—led to the proliferation of a much more limited sense of what exactly “the heterosexual matrix” means.

That limited sense fails to see the mechanism by which the matrix operates: the internalization of prohibited desires. Without melancholic incorporation, the heterosexual matrix looks near identical to Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality”—part of its simplification’s appeal and its danger. Butler describes these prohibited desires: “In the case of a prohibited heterosexual union, it is the object which is denied, but not the modality of desire, so that the desire is deflected from that object onto other objects of the opposite sex. But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union... both the desire and the object require renunciation and so become subject to the internalizing strategies of melancholia” (Butler [1990] 1999, 58–59). Butler presents two arenas for denial: the modality of desire and the object of desire. However, these two denials rest on two additional prior denials that must be accomplished to even begin speaking of heterosexual or homosexual unions. The desiring subject must already “have” (or be interpellated as having) a stable conception of a morphological and psychic originating gender against which the desired object’s gender (itself also assumed identifiable and stable) can be described as either “hetero” (different) or “homo” (same). However, Butler reminds us that desiring subjects come to be through this very gender matrix: the achievement of a desiring subject’s gender is always conditional and takes shape before any sort of imagined-volitional gender. Gender, like hell, is other people. The other people who surround the Child, whose desires are managed through the Child, are the ones who first impute onto the Child a sense of gender. That sense of gender becomes the launching pad for desires, described as either homo- or hetero-, depending on their relation to the Child’s priorly imputed gender.

A subject desiring a same-gender object requires that the desiring subject’s gender already be articulated. What Butler calls “loss of the same-sexed object” is predicated on a prior loss of the differently sexed self. Desire for the father can be described as homosexual (in Butler’s language) or feminine (in Freud’s) only after the Child is first imputed as boy. Can that Child, imputed boy, actually love the father in quite a heterosexual fashion? Can the Child, imputed boy, desire his mother not in a heterosexual fashion, but rather quite, ahem, sapphicly? Must the one the Child sees (and desires) as “father” be a man at all?

Imagine a young child, imputed boy, nicknamed “Baby (O)eddie” for obvious attachment to the mother, whose desire for the mother travels not along lines of difference but along a route of sameness (perhaps a shared masquerade), who is punished for improperly desiring. Does this child, imputed boy, love the mother as if the mother was a father, or does this child, imputed boy, love the mother as if the child themself were a girl?¹² What of the possibility for a cross-gendered heterosexual desire, where the child, imputed boy, desires the mother as if the child were a girl and the mother her father? Such layered psychic development occurs in and through the gender matrix and may require a return to Freud’s original understanding of masculinity and femininity as activity and passivity (without as much gendered baggage as possible) to articulate. Is the desire active or passive? Is the subject imagining its loved object as similar (or the same) to them or different (or opposite) from them? What morphological imaginary is at play in the description of the desire as active or passive? Although at odds with attempts at grand unifying theories like those of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, (early) Rubin, and Wittig, does this reading of psychic prohibition not make for a much more fascinating—dare I say fecund—psychic map?

TRANSSEXUAL IS TO NONTRANSSEXUAL NOT AS COPY IS TO ORIGINAL BUT AS COPY IS TO COPY; INTERSEX IS TO NONINTERSEX NOT AS COPY IS TO ORIGINAL BUT AS COPY IS TO COPY

Instituted before the prohibition on homosexuality (which is itself before the prohibition on incest)¹³ are the prohibitions on intersexuality and transsexuality. When we think psychic prohibitions, we often imagine a volitional and fully formed subject prevented from desiring or doing something. Butler shows, however, that the desiring subject comes to be out of this matrix, comes into language and subjectivity within the confines of the gender matrix. This means gender is attributed by others first rather than by oneself. Gender is like hell: other people. These “other people” are the ones whose behaviors—purposeful or not (which I mention because recent anti-trans waves show grooming children to be nontranssexual is a time-honored American pastime that produces the nontrans, non-intersex citizen body)—performatively constitute the gender of the Child. First, however, these others must have already performatively constituted the sex of the Child (imagined as separate from and before gender’s emergence)—and herein lies the prohibition on intersexuality. This taboo’s late-breaking entrance to my argument illustrates its operation as a disappearing act: it is enacted before the Child’s own sense of gendered development but without the Child (or often the adults doing the prohibiting) noticing. Through articulating the prohibition on transsexuality, the taboo that must occur prior—that of intersexuality—can be made to appear. In the context of the gender matrix and its attendant prohibitions, intersexuality operates in the realm of (bodily and psychic) “being” and transsexuality in that of “becoming;” the being has already been determined before becoming can happen.

The proliferation of “gender reveals”¹⁴ and how quickly “boy or girl?” is asked of pregnant people and new parents show that high in the minds of expectant parents and their social worlds is the demand that their child conform to one of two possible sexes. This determination, though it begins before any stage of childhood psychic development, has repercussions across a lifetime for intersex and non-intersex people alike. This affects how the Child is dressed, spoken about, and engaged with and what information the Child will have available to themselves about their own morphology later on.¹⁵ The demand that we performatively constitute the sex of the Child before birth, often through public social declarations, is a manifestation of the taboo on intersexuality. The Child’s putatively stable sexed “identity,” as communicated by others, provides a wellspring of assumptions, prohibitions, and desires for the psyche in development—and marks the launching pad for the development of (non-)transsexual desires, which themselves are undergirded by an already assigned (seemingly unchangeable and never-before-changed) “sex.” Butler reminds us prohibitions are perversely productive; attempts to performatively constitute another’s (sex or) gender always fail.¹⁶ Intersexuality, like transsexuality, only exists as a category when binary gender is demanded and enforced: they both emerge within the gender matrix.

The Child receives their “given” binary “sex;” then that sex must be stabilized. Sex must be rendered unchanging, so the Child’s putative sex as first learned will be their only sex. A prohibition takes shape against the very possibility of changing one’s sex (and against sex being simply gender). This disavowal of intersexuality and transsexuality then confirms the directionality of any desire that Child may have. The Child, for instance, “is” a “girl.” Not only is “girl” the state of that Child since a fetus, but now “girl” is a transtemporal constant. “Girl’s” desires can now be adjudicated as either (properly) heterosexual or (improperly) homosexual, with the former requiring a “boy” love object and the latter a “girl” love object. If this “girl” desires a “boy,” it is impossible both that the “girl’s” experience of desire could correspond to something like faggotry or dykeness, though such influences take shape quite early, no matter how much one attempts to exclude queerness from publicity and intelligibility. Not only is “girl’s” sex stabilized, but “girl” has learned that “boy’s” sex is stabilized also. The pathway of desire of “girl” for “boy” is necessarily heterosexual. This clearly does not hold—as one example, Butler reminds us “some heterosexual or bisexual women may well prefer that the relation of “figure” to “ground” work in the opposite direction—that is, they may prefer that their girls be boys” (Butler [1990] 1999, 123).

Taboos on intersexuality and transsexuality help make sense of eliminationist rhetoric in (Christo-)fascist anti-trans attacks, as well as public discourses surrounding the medicalization of trans kids and broader invocations of “groomer” as a pejorative against queers of all stripes. Gender is, like hell, other people—and while at first those other people may be quite insular, it may not always stay that way. Transsexuality is terrifying because those “other people” who participate in gender’s production are, also, us—whether or not “we” are intended or desired to be there. Transsexuals and intersex people are always already part of that “we,” though “we” only come into meaning through the gender matrix. These psychic prohibitions are maintained at steep costs: “Gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity. Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex, but in the production and “disposition” of sexual desire” (Butler [1990] 1999, 63). The consistent application of taboos against intersexuality and transsexuality is best undertaken without any intersex or trans subjects entering a given milieu. The consistent application of the taboo against intersexuality requires that intersex people not speak openly about their experiences nor experience pleasure, joy, relationships, or desire—that they live only in the shadows as the constitutive outside that confirms sex’s dyadic structure. The consistent application of the taboo against transsexuality requires trans people not exist and especially not exist happily.¹⁷

***

In an interview with trans activist Kate More, Butler says, “In some ways my identification with transsexuality is rather seamless, which I’m happy to avow, though that’s not the same as having an identity. That’s just because I have problems with identity!” (More and Butler 1999). I am interested, given the “problems with identity” I share with Butler, in expansive affiliations with transsexuality and intersexuality that can unseat these prohibitions’ vice-grip, without falling into the traps of identity Butler reminds us to avoid.

As Butler seeks a form of feminist politics without recourse to a stable subject “woman,” I hope for transsexual politics without recourse to a stable “transsexual” subject. So often when that identity (only legible through the gender matrix) solidifies, it is policed so those who express affiliation without identity are cast aside—which is not to say conversely that everyone is trans. This happened in trans studies literature on Butler, stemming from a shared assumption that Butler is not “one of us.”¹⁸ If they were not or are not, then within that logic perhaps neither am I. I imagine our morphologies, desires, and frames of reference, while containing surprising similarities, are far from identical and easily (if differentially) recognizable to many as trans. How can we best affiliate to dismantle these formative taboos without caping to identitarian politics? To answer such an unanswerable question—a rhetorical strategy of Butler’s that constitutes me as a scholar—Gender Trouble helps.

REFERENCES

Footnotes