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Abstract

In this essay, I interrogate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s KP-0401, a 2022 legal opinion letter that frames gender affirming healthcare as dangerous, sterilizing, and therefore, child abuse. Within this framing, trans* youth are presented as both delusional and deviant, written off as victims of abuse and social contagion. In analyzing KP-0401 through a critical perspective of affect and performativity, I demonstrate how particular affects have gained power through their circulation to reify feelings and performances of cisheteronormativity, often through establishing the trans* body as a source of negative affect, like fear or repulsion, and trans* youth as infantile and incompetent. By contrast, I argue that KP-0401 exemplifies how anti-trans* rhetoric operates within a positive affective orientation of love and parental protection that understands cisheteronormativity as extraideological—objective, natural, and logical to the point of being “beyond” ideological boundaries—and transphobia, by extension, as a similarly objective form of common sense. I conclude by reflecting on how KP-0401 served as a predecessor to virulent anti-trans* affects and legislation in 2023 as well as the powerful potentiality of trans* youth.

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