Review: Talia Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy aims to deconstruct the entire Western philosophical construction of human social relations. In its place, she builds a new understanding—one that rejects the significance of subjecthood, and instead takes sociality, appearance, intimacy, and objecthood as its atoms. This view, called interpersonal spatiality, lays the groundwork for a radically restructured account of racialized (trans)gender embodiment and its relationship to colonial modernity.

The book is ambitious, original, and theoretically rich. Its core ideas are powerful, calling for a profound shift in both the grounds and the outputs of trans philosophy—one that refuses to cede any territory to colonialist philosophical assumptions that obscure trans experience, especially racialized trans experience, by design. The writing, however, is at times either opaque, too quick, or both, a departure from Bettcher’s characteristically clear, careful style. Nevertheless, readers willing to unpack and reconstruct its arguments, and perhaps do some reparative work on its connective tissues, will find a wealth of insight, combining into a comprehensive theoretical framework that is worthy of serious attention.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “The Central Concepts,” is primarily overview, introduction of terms, and literature review. The substantive work begins in the second section, “The Main Idea.” Here, Bettcher focuses on trans people’s embodied experiences: of oppression, intimacy, and, crucially, of euphoria and dysphoria, which Bettcher places on a spectrum of “phoria.” For Bettcher, existing accounts are reductive. Moreover, they cannot sufficiently explain what she argues is the core feature of trans oppression: reality enforcement, the violent insistence that a trans person’s gendered appearance is underwritten by a “real” sex which can, and should, be exposed. To explain reality enforcement, we need a philosophical system which centers appearance and sociality. Bettcher proposes interpersonal spatiality. Here, the key feature of the social world is the sets of boundaries that govern intimate access to our bodies; when and how are those bodies permissibly revealed or touched? According to what Bettcher calls the “folk system” of interpersonal spatiality, boundaries are indexed to moral sex—man, woman, boy, girl—on which particular “intimate appearances” are signified by patterns of “proper appearance” communicated by clothing and gesture. Trans experience often contains a realization (in the “blank open”) that these prescriptions are contingent, and different ways of relating are possible.

The title Beyond Personhood is primarily elaborated in the book’s third section, “The Buried Lede.” The titular lede is the idea that the notion of “person” is a racist colonialist construction that justifies abuse. Person is understood as equivalent with a thinking feeling subject, contrasted by definition with the fungible objects upon which one gazes. As Bettcher points out, the early modern European philosophical system which originated this concept used it to justify colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery, on the grounds that there were humans—specifically, Brown and Black humans—that were not persons. Bettcher resists this separation, and moves to recenter human morphology, rather than subjecthood, in our moral understanding.

Morphology, of course, always exists within social systems of interpersonal spatiality. The “folk system” is based in colonial modernity. Building on María Lugones’ articulation of the “light side” and “dark side” of colonial gender (Lugones Reference Lugones2007), Bettcher argues that white European colonizers of any moral sex are extended some personhood and agency, while for Black and Brown colonized people, various forms of abuse are permitted or endorsed. But it need not be this way. That is, interpersonal spatiality is essential to human sociality, but the abusive “folk system” is not. Things might be different; they might be better.

In short, for Bettcher, personhood is an illusion. We are not primarily subjects. Rather, we are all interpersonal objects, experiencing ourselves and others as clothed organisms constituted by morally loaded, sex- and race-differentiated sets of boundaries. This is a profound suggestion not just in its rejection of hegemonic Western thought, but in its implicit critique of many critical traditions undertaken within that system. A major strategy here has been to argue that all humans are subjects. Iris Young, for example, identifies objectification as a key feature of cultural imperialism, which is in turn a “face” of oppression (Young Reference Young1990, 60). Bettcher’s strategy is different. Instead of extending subjecthood to the objectified, she aims to explode the importance of subjecthood altogether, and instead argue that the morally important dimensions of interpersonal relations lie in how we are treated as objects. In fact, for Bettcher, the assumed primacy of subjecthood obscures what’s important about that objecthood.

This is a provocative move, and, I think, one that has great potential for explaining many varieties of interpersonal oppression—including ones Bettcher herself does not explore at length, such as the systematic abuse of disabled bodies, or at all, such as the moralized dehumanization of fat bodies. However, there are other forms of abuse it does not explain. For example, this account does not provide tools to understand our relationships to those who do not share our morphology, such as non-human animals. Non-human animals are interwoven with human lives, in roles ranging from pampered pets to systematically tortured factory-farmed livestock. Many animal rights activists have appealed to subject-based accounts to explain the moral harms of the latter. Subjects have inherent rights, in virtue of the kinds of things they are; to be a subject is to be deserving of certain forms of respect. Thus, the animal rights activist only has to demonstrate that animals are subjects of some kind. I don’t raise this point to defend a subject-based account, but to demonstrate that Bettcher’s view, which grounds moral consideration in specifically human morphology, currently does not explain this important dimension of moral sociality.

This raises a broader question: Which normative principles underwrite Bettcher’s critiques of the folk system? What makes some systems of interpersonal spatiality better than others? Bettcher gestures in this direction, but only briefly:

But this only pushes the problem back a step. What underwrites “the guiding values of intimacy and distance”? Again, a subject-based account has such values built in. If we are all interpersonal objects, more must be said about what follows, morally speaking.

This is not, of course, to say that nothing could be said. As Bettcher writes: “Nothing I have said affirms that interpersonal spatiality exhaustively accounts for morality” (202). I want to hear more. What makes (a particular) morphology morally significant? Why does intimacy matter?

This is a pressing question because, for Bettcher, whether something is in fact a violation depends on the relevant system of interpersonal spatiality. If we want to resist the judgment the system produces, we must critique the entire system (41-42). For example, if the folk system holds that trans people’s boundaries can be nonconsensually crossed in order to engage in reality enforcement, this is in fact true within the system. The problem is that the system is abusive. So, I would like some account of what makes such a system abusive, and why.

To be clear, no nuanced philosophical work is needed to demonstrate that the folk system is abusive. Its wrongs are many, egregious, and obvious, and any good moral framework should recognize that. My point is not that it is ambiguous whether the folk system is in fact abusive, but rather that some explanation of the principles which explain this abusiveness is necessary to do some of the work I want this account to do. What might we say about more subtle cases? For example, how might we evaluate resistant underworlds which try, but fail, to fully escape the overworld’s abuses—or which create entirely new forms of violation? If we want to build non-abusive systems of interpersonal spatiality, what commitments will underwrite them? These questions, I argue, are crucial to a constructive project. Better social relations cannot spring fully formed from the void; they are built out of the transformed elements of our existing world. To do that constructive, transformative work, we need to understand what kind of a system we are aiming for.

At the end of the book, I’m left with the feeling that I’ll have to let it marinate for a long time before I’ll really know what I think. That’s not a bad feeling, but it does make writing a review difficult. This is certainly a titanic contribution to trans philosophy, and to social philosophy more generally. I encourage interested readers to grapple with it for themselves.