Since the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990, transgender scholars have challenged performativity theory on the basis that it describes gender as something frivolous and quickly “taken off” or “put on.” However, these critiques are inadequate because a closer reading of performativity theory shows that the theory stresses the slow sedimentation of gender over time. Regardless, performativity theory still does not properly accommodate transgender identities due to its essential anti-foundationalism, which is at odds with the foundation of transgender politics: the concept of an internal, immutable gender identity, also known as subconscious sex. Therefore, I propose integrating performativity theory into a more comprehensive framework that I call gender-as-rhetoric. This framework stresses the rhetorical dimension of gender, and especially and specifically, its intentionality. I then demonstrate the strengths and details of the framework by applying it to two memoirs by trans women, Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness and Sarah McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality. By analyzing these memoirs using rhetorical ecologies, affective economies, and discourses on passing, I show that understanding trans identities requires treating gender as a kind of embodied argument.

Keywords[:] gender, sex, transgender, transsexual, performativity, rhetoric, rhetorical ecology, affect, passing, Sarah McBride, Janet Mock, Judith Butler