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“This is the future that conservatives want”�Chronotopes of Trans Life in North Carolina’s Sociopolitical Climate

Archie Crowley (they/them)

Assistant Professor, English, Elon University

Haley Kinsler (he/they/she)

MA Student, Linguistics, North Carolina State University

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Land Acknowledgement

This work was conducted on the traditional homelands and gathering places of the Eno, Tutelo, Shakori, Coharie, Eastern Band of Cherokee, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Sappony and Waccamaw Siouan in the Piedmont of what is now called North Carolina.

We share an ongoing responsibility to safeguard these lands and to respect the sovereignty of the tribes and Indigenous nations residing in North Carolina.

Additionally, we work on land where local infrastructure was built by the labor of enslaved Black people who were forcibly brought here against their will.

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Trans life in the U.S. Southeast

“I love the South, but loving the South is mighty tricky” (Whitlock, 2007 p. xxii)
Widespread narrative that queer and trans Southerners want to “escape” the South
The South as a region is often construed as “an easy repository for all that is backward and hurtful in the United States, past and present” (Law 2001, p 3)
Increased research on trans people who do choose to stay in the South (Abelson 2019, Rogers 2020)
Estimated 44,750 in North Carolina (0.60% of pop.) (Flores et al. 2016)

Photo Credit: Hannah Schoenbaum/AP Photo

Aug. 16, 2023

In the introduction to the collection Queer South Rising: Voices of a Contested Place, Reta Whitlock writes [click]: “I love the South, but loving the South is mighty tricky” (Whitlock, 2013, p. xxii). Many queer Southerners grapple with the with the histories of the Confederacy and the legacies of slavery and racism in the region. Current conservative politics and anti- queer and trans legislation can make the region seem inhospitable to queer survival and thriving.

Furthermore [click] within mainstream US discourses, there is a popular narrative that queer and trans people from the US South want to “escape” their “backwards” communities and move to “the big city,” typically portrayed as liberal urban enclaves in the West and North, such as San Francisco and New York (Law, 2001).

These representations often uphold and idea that the south is uniquely bad, and in the mind of many people in the U.S, the south is “a repository for all that is backward and hurtful in the United States, past and present”

There are some trans Southerners do desire to leave the region and make a new home. However, [click] research has shown that many trans individuals do in fact stay and make their home in the US South (Abelson, 2019; Rogers, 2020). For some, staying is valuable because it is where they have community support and networks (sometimes with biological and sometimes with chosen families), and simply, it is their home.

[click] In the case of North Carolina, there is estimated to be about 44,750 trans people who live in the state.

Conservative religious ideals, difficulty accessing LGBTQ+ specific resources, minimal job opportunities, and conflict with family are reasons that often motivate “a great migration” to other areas of the United States (A. H. Johnson et al., 2020).

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Anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

Anti-trans bills passed in 2022

26 bills across 13 states
Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah

Anti-trans bills passed in 2023

85 bills across 24 states
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming

Anti-trans bills passed in 2024 (so far)

18 bills across 8 states
Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming

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2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

HB 2 ”Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act”

HB 574 ”Fairness in Women's Sports Act”

HB 808 ”Gender Transition/Minors”

SB 49: “Parents' Bill of Rights”

North Carolina

HB 142 “Preemption of Regulation of Access to Multiple Occupancy Restrooms

HB 358 “Save Women’s Sports Act”

HB 906 “Statewide Nondiscrimination/Funds”

7 anti-trans bills currently in the legislature

2024

Photo Credit: Nat Johnson, April 25, 2016

Photo Credit: Jennifer Fernandez/NC Health News, May 26, 2023

Within North Carolina, specifically, the passage of anti-trans legislation has been ongoing since 2016, when the infamous “bathroom bill” was passed, restricting the access of trans and nonbinary people to public restrooms. Last year, three anti-trans bills were passed by the legislature in July, including HB 874, the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act”, which restricts trans youths’ ability to participate in sports, HB 808, which bans gender affirming care for youth under the age of eighteen, and SB 49, the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” which prohibits the discussion of issues related to sexuality or gender in public schools and furthermore requires parents to be notified of any name or pronoun that is not listed on their legal paperwork.

These bills were passed nearly simultaneously, referred to locally by LGBTQIA+ organizations as the “Slate of Hate”, and while they were vetoed by Governor Roy Cooper in 2023, those vetoes were soon overturned in August. At this time there are 7 anti-trans bills currently sitting in the legislature, and many trans and nonbinary North Carolinians are awaiting the beginning of our legislative session for this year, which will start in just a few weeks.

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The North Carolina Trans and Nonbinary Language Project

Our Positionalities
Recruitment

Snowball sampling via social networks (FB groups, Discord Servers) and in-person flyers

Interviews

August-December 2023
18 one-on-one semi-structured interviews with trans and nonbinary people living in NC
Conducted in locations chosen by participants (e.g., university offices, homes, public library, Zoom)

As part of our methods, we’d like to contextualize ourselves in this research. I am a white trans and nonbinary person, a new assistant professor, and I’ve lived in the US South for the past 7 years, but I am not a Southerner.

I am a second year master's student in linguistics at NC State University in Raleigh, NC. I like to also give a bit of a positionality statement as well as I feel that is important to consider in my orientation to my work, so I am a white, trans, queer person who bounced around the east coast a bit while growing up, but I have lived in North Carolina for most of my life, and much of that time was spent in Southern Wake County.

The interviews we will be analyzing here come from a project that Haley and I started in 2023, the North Carolina Trans and Nonbinary Language Project. Between August and December 2023, Haley and I conducted 18 one-on-one semi structured interviews with participants primarily located in the piedmont region of North Carolina.

In the interviews, we asked sets of questions about the participant's identity and background, experiences in trans communities and in North Carolina, as well as questions about language use within trans communities. These extracts we will show today have been selected as representative samples XX.

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Participants

Pre-interview demographic survey

Gender	3 trans women, 2 trans men, 11 non-binary, and 2 “other”
Age	Range from 22-45, with a median age of 25
Race	13 white, 3 Black, 1 Indigenous, and 1 mixed-race
Education	5 have attended some college, 2 have an Associates, 8 have a Bachelors, and 3 have a Masters
Class	5 identified as working class, 4 as lower middle class, 4 as middle class, and 5 as upper middle class
Time in NC	9 have lived in NC their whole life, 3 for more than half, 3 for more than a third, and 2 for less than a third

Here we have some specific demographics about our participants, but the main takeaway is that the groups is majority white, young, college educated, and with a gender identity that falls outside the gender binary. This was likely shaped by our recruitment methods of snowball sampling through existing social networks. As we continue this project, one of our goals moving forward is to recruit participants that reflect the diversity of trans experiences in North Carolina, particularly of trans people of color and older trans adults.

And for this project, we recruited any trans or nonbinary person currently living in North Carolina, and of the 18, 9 had lived in NC their whole life and the other 9 had lived there for varying lengths of time. If you want to know more about these participants relationship to the identity of “Southerner,” you should go see Haley’s talk tomorrow.

Of participants who grew up in NC (N=13):

4 identify as Southern, 6 identify as Southern sometimes, and 3 do not identify as Southern

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Chronotopes

The chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) highlights the ways that “space, time, and models of personhood are linked in narrative frameworks” (Rosa, 2015, p.109).

Chronotopes allow for a multidimensional account of time and space to contextualize identity in interaction (Blommaert, 2015)

“The invocation of specific chronotopic frames foreground specific types of language/identity work, and thus social behaviors, that both move across and bring together multiple spatialities and temporalities” (Rowlett and King 2023)

In this presentation, we take up the Baktinian concept of the “chronotope,” literally “time-space” to explore the ways in which “time, space, and models of personhood” become linked together. In our case, how they become linked for trans and nonbinary people in North Carolina.

dig into the relationship between the context of time and Specific chronotopes produce specific kinds of person,

actions, meaning, and value

They allow for a multidimensional account of time and space to contextualize identity in interaction. We use this framework to ask: How do trans and nonbinary North Carolininans’ experiences of timespace shape their relationship to the region?

“[through] chronotopic analysis we have also been able to demonstrate how temporalities associated with conceptions of North and South, fleetingness and stillness, visiting and staying in place, and the co-occurrence of pasts, presents, and possible futures”

illustrate the way in which trans and nonbinary people describe their experiences in different timespaces in North Carolina, illuminating the way that they view the relationship between local understandings of gender and transness with their own identities.

“the queer southerner’s position relative to the South is split—insider/outsider—thus creating a double or triple vision of the world, a position from which one may both participate in southern culture and yet remain apart from it” (Dews 2001: 236).

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Chronotopes

place

time

person

Hostile Space

Rural

“Backwards”

Conservative

Not queer/trans

Normative

Safe Haven

Urban

Progressive

Future/Forward

Queer/trans

How do trans and nonbinary North Carolinians’ experiences of timespace shape their relationship to the region?

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Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

Participants describe different types of timespaces in North Carolina based on their lived experiences as trans people in the state
These chronotopes offer a mechanism for understanding how “participants rely on chronotopic formulations of place, time, and personhood” (Agha 2015) in a way that shapes their practices and behaviors
The safe haven describes a space that fosters trans inclusivity and allows the possibility for a trans future in the South
This is in contrast to the hostile space, which which invokes popular narratives about the South as being sociopolitically conservative and regressive

This first set of chronotopes looks at the way in which participants described their experiences in different timespaces in North Carolina, illuminating the complex relationship that exists between local understandings of gender and transness with participants’ understandings of their gender, presentation, and practices [>>] This variation in the types of presentations and practices available to participants based on the level of safety they experience in each respective chronotope highlights a point from Asif Agha [ah-sif ah-guh] on chronotopes as constructively formulating place, time, and personhood [>>]

We refer to the first of these as the safe haven chronotope, then. This is a chronotope that highlights spaces that are trans-inclusive, progressive, and that allowed participants to feel comfortable presenting openly as queer or trans so that they can maintain practices and embodiment without risk of anti-trans backlash [>>]

The hostile place chronotope, however, is much more fraught with anti-trans sentiment. Here, participants expressed fears about regressive and conservative spaces in the South, grappling with the potential risks to their safety that come with navigating areas that are hostile to trans people.

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Hannah (she/her)�white, trans woman, 36 years old

1	Durham to North Carolina experiences are very different
2	in Durham it's kind of like easy to forget that I have this difference with other people
3	a lot of the time it’s easy to just like blend in kind of
4	and it's like I notice people who I don't know maybe they are or aren’t trans
5	but they- it seems like they're queer presenting in some way just very often
6	and then you know you leave Durham and you're on a road trip or something and you're like
7	‘oh, yeah okay this is what most of the state looks like actually’

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

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Hannah (she/her)�white, trans woman, 36 years old

1	Durham to North Carolina experiences are very different
2	in Durham it's kind of like easy to forget that I have this difference with other people
3	a lot of the time it’s easy to just like blend in kind of
4	and it's like I notice people who I don't know maybe they are or aren’t trans
5	but they- it seems like they're queer presenting in some way just very often
6	and then you know you leave Durham and you're on a road trip or something and you're like
7	‘oh, yeah okay this is what most of the state looks like actually’

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

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Hannah (she/her)�white, trans woman, 36 years old

1	Durham to North Carolina experiences are very different
2	in Durham it's kind of like easy to forget that I have this difference with other people
3	a lot of the time it’s easy to just like blend in kind of
4	and it's like I notice people who I don't know maybe they are or aren’t trans
5	but they- it seems like they're queer presenting in some way just very often
6	and then you know you leave Durham and you're on a road trip or something and you're like
7	‘oh, yeah okay this is what most of the state looks like actually’

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

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Hannah (she/her)�white, trans woman, 36 years old

1	Durham to North Carolina experiences are very different
2	in Durham it's kind of like easy to forget that I have this difference with other people
3	a lot of the time it’s easy to just like blend in kind of
4	and it's like I notice people who I don't know maybe they are or aren’t trans
5	but they- it seems like they're queer presenting in some way just very often
6	and then you know you leave Durham and you're on a road trip or something and you're like
7	‘oh, yeah okay this is what most of the state looks like actually’

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

She draws a contrast between this chronotope and her time spent in other regions of North Carolina which do not have a visibly queer or trans community, and she therefore draws a boundary between the types of experiences she can have in Durham and the rest of the state.

She highlights this contrast in line six as she begins to narrate the experience she feels a trans person would have if they were to leave this haven. She states “you leave Durham and you’re on a road trip or something,” which places the listener in a context in which they leave this safe haven as a space for the sake of temporarily traveling through nearby regions.

She then voices the type of reaction that one would have to leaving this safe haven when she says “okay this is what most of the state looks like actually.” The use of that epistemic stance marker, “actually,” helps to solidify that the speaker being voiced is confronted with this reality that anti-trans sentiment and these regressive values exist outside of the safe haven present in Durham.

Overall, the work Hannah does in this excerpt serves to illustrate how she orients herself to different spaces and times in North Carolina as a trans woman. In moments where she is traveling through a rural area without a visibly queer or trans community, she is reminded of her lack of access to that community and ability to safely be out among other people. This is in stark contrast to Durham, which she describes as an isolated area in which trans people can, and do, exist openly. Her description of rural versus more populous and progressive locations in the state illustrates how these safe havens and hostile places require that she adapt her behavior, presentation, and relationships with members of the community located within each respective chronotope.

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Stone (she/her or they/them)�Afro-Caribbean, gender non-conforming femme, 21 years old

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

1	I personally have never felt uncomfortable in North Carolina even when I was very clearly transitioning
2	and even when I quite frankly look like a gay twink with like dyed hair
3	now I feel that widely the political atmosphere is tense and tightening
4	in a way that makes me and a lot of my friends and community members feel stifled
5	I will say that I have never felt so constantly cautious and aware of my surroundings than I have at this moment in time

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Stone (she/her or they/them)�Afro-Caribbean, gender-nonconforming femme, 21 years old

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

1	I personally have never felt uncomfortable in North Carolina even when I was very clearly transitioning
2	and even when I quite frankly look like a gay twink with like dyed hair
3	now I feel that widely the political atmosphere is tense and tightening
4	in a way that makes me and a lot of my friends and community members feel stifled
5	I will say that I have never felt so constantly cautious and aware of my surroundings than I have at this moment in time

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Stone (she/her or they/them)�Afro-Caribbean, gender-nonconforming femme, 21 years old

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

1	I personally have never felt uncomfortable in North Carolina even when I was very clearly transitioning
2	and even when I quite frankly look like a gay twink with like dyed hair
3	now I feel that widely the political atmosphere is tense and tightening
4	in a way that makes me and a lot of my friends and community members feel stifled
5	I will say that I have never felt so constantly cautious and aware of my surroundings than I have at this moment in time

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Stone (she/her or they/them)�Afro-Caribbean, gender-nonconforming femme, 21 years old

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

1	I personally have never felt uncomfortable in North Carolina even when I was very clearly transitioning
2	and even when I quite frankly look like a gay twink with like dyed hair
3	now I feel that widely the political atmosphere is tense and tightening
4	in a way that makes me and a lot of my friends and community members feel stifled
5	I will say that I have never felt so constantly cautious and aware of my surroundings than I have at this moment in time

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“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

Participants connect the South to “stereotypical qualities of moral and linguistic backwardness” (Chun 2018, p.425)

Jaden: “[Sounding Southern] seems to shape people's opinions of me in a way that I don't like with being kind of backwards with being maybe a bit less intelligent.”

Queer life is often oriented to a queer futurity (Muñoz 2009)
With the increase of anti-trans legislation in NC and surrounding states, there is awareness of a conservative future
However, some participants challenge this chronotopic construction of the South, instead articulating a move towards a trans Southern future

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Ezra (they/them) �white, nonbinary, 29 years old

1	no one gets you know like any- anything that talks about marriage or relationships or gender or anything
2	is now no longer allowed on my bookshelf
3	and in you know so they basically talked about like schools teachers in Florida are already doing this
4	where it's like cool we can learn about like earthquakes and like the water cycle and that's it
5	like it's like this is the future that conservatives want

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Ezra (they/them) �white, nonbinary, 29 years old

1	no one gets you know like any- anything that talks about marriage or relationships or gender or anything
2	is now no longer allowed on my bookshelf
3	and in you know so they basically talked about like schools teachers in Florida are already doing this
4	where it's like cool we can learn about like earthquakes and like the water cycle and that's it
5	like it's like this is the future that conservatives want

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Kay (they/them)�Black, nonbinary, 23 years old

1	because I really like long term
2	I see myself returning back to the place I was from
3	so that I can take what I've learned and hopefully like plant seeds here for people
4	especially like it's much easier to be queer and Black in California
5	than it is to be queer and Black in the bible belt like Southern United States

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Kay (they/them)�Black, nonbinary, 23 years old

1	because I really like long term
2	I see myself returning back to the place I was from
3	so that I can take what I've learned and hopefully like plant seeds here for people
4	especially like it's much easier to be queer and Black in California
5	than it is to be queer and Black in the bible belt like Southern United States

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Daisy (he/they)�white, agender/genderqueer, 26 years old

1	there's a lot of good things about North Carolina
2	it's not you know not everyone down here is a Republican
3	not everyone down here is like horrible evil etc.
4	I'm like, I don't know
5	I want like
6	being an NC native is a really important part of my identity now
7	because I want that community to exist for people
8	like I don't know
9	I don't think we should have to leave the places we grew up in
10	that we're attached to
11	just to find a safe community

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Daisy (he/they)�white, agender/genderqueer, 26 years old

1	there's a lot of good things about North Carolina
2	it's not you know not everyone down here is a Republican
3	not everyone down here is like horrible evil, etc.
4	I'm like, I don't know
5	I want like
6	being an NC native is a really important part of my identity now
7	because I want that community to exist for people
8	like I don't know
9	I don't think we should have to leave the places we grew up in
10	that we're attached to
11	just to find a safe community

“Backwards” Southernness vs. Queer Futurity

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Conclusion

As trans and nonbinary people in North Carolina navigate the onslaught of anti-trans legislation at the state level, they discursively construct contrasting chronotopic frames:

“Safe haven” vs “hostile place”
“Backwards South” vs “queer future”

However, the contrasts are messy and malleable
For many participants, there is a desire to work for a trans Southern futures

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References

Abelson, M. J. (2019). Men in place: Trans masculinity, race, and sexuality in America. U of Minnesota Press.

Agha, A. (2015). Chronotopic formulations and kinship behaviors in social history. Anthropological Quarterly, 401-415.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination.

Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 105-116.

Chun, E. W. (2018). Listening to the Southern redneck: Pathways of contextualization on YouTube. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 93(3-4), 425-444.

Dews, C. L. B., & Law, C. L. (Eds.). (2001). Out in the South. Temple University Press.

Flores, A. R., Herman, J. L., Gates, G. J., & Brown, T. N. T. (2016). How many adults identify as transgender in the united states? (p. 13). The Williams Institute.

Rogers, B. A. (2020). Trans men in the South: Becoming men. Lexington Books.

Rosa, J. (2016). Racializing language, regimenting Latinas/os: Chronotope, social tense, and American raciolinguistic futures. Language & Communication, 46, 106-117.

Rowlett, B. J., & King, B. W. (2023). Merging mobilities: Querying knowledges, actions, and chronotopes in discourses of transcultural relationships from a North/South queer contact zone. Critical Discourse Studies, 20(2), 111-127

Whitlock, R. U. (Ed.). (2013). Queer South Rising: Voices of a contested place. IAP.

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Thank you!

Thank you to the participants who generously gave their time and insight!

Archie Crowley acrowley7@elon.edu

Haley Kinsler hmkinsle@ncsu.edu

Image Credit: Campaign for Southern Equality

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North Carolina

Florida

“Backwards”

Forward/Future

North

South

safe haven

hostile place

North Carolina (rural)

conservatism

chronotopes

time

place

progressivism

North Carolina (urban)

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“Backwards”

Forward/Future

safe haven

hostile place

conservatism

chronotopes

time

place

progressivism

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Jeremy (they/them)� white, transmasculine, 36 years old

1	You know are they going to attack our ability to exist?
2	and yeah we've- we've been following,
3	we mean- just the community following Florida very closely,
4	because it's kind of unfortunately they all kind of work together
5	and kind of had the same blueprint

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Ezra (they/them) �white, nonbinary, 29 years old

1	I was on a Megabus home as HB2 was being pushed through
2	and so I was following along really closely
3	and just that feeling of like oh this is awful right?
4	like this is that feeling of like oh cool
5	my state government hates me, and hates the people I care about
6	it's a really hard feeling

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space

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Ezra (they/them) �white, nonbinary, 29 years old

1	I was on a Megabus home as HB2 was being pushed through
2	and so I was following along really closely
3	and just that feeling of like oh this is awful right?
4	like this is that feeling of like oh cool
5	my state government hates me and hates the people I care about
6	it's a really hard feeling

Safe Haven vs. Hostile Space