On July 26, 2011, Defense Attorney Robyn Bramson asked Judge Charles Campbell to direct Maeve Fox to produce several pieces of physical evidence for the defense team’s use during testimony. The district attorney agreed, and a number of large paper bags made their way into the courtroom, each containing something that had belonged to Latisha King. One of those bags held a pair of brown, heeled boots. Another held a backpack containing several items, including makeup and lipstick. And another contained a strapless, green homecoming dress. The defense team requested these items, procured them, and cut them out of the brown paper evidence bags into which they had been carefully sealed. Showed them to the witness. Walked them back and forth in front of the members of the jury. In requesting that these objects be brought into the courtroom, the defense team demonstrated its belief that the physical presence of these objects was able to convey something that a photographic representation or verbal description of them could not. In putting these things in front of the jury, the lawyers were asking these objects to disclose their meaning, a disclosure, and perhaps even a meaning, that became possible only in the physical presence of the object.
As we have seen, throughout this trial gender was read from the expression, rather than the materiality, of the body. Latisha King’s gender was read from her gestures, her comportment, her movement. But at several crucial moments during the trial, gender was also discerned from and determined by objects. At first glance, these would seem to be opposed, even mutually canceling, understandings of what gender is. If gender inheres in gestures, than it is ephemeral, temporally undecidable, immaterial, whereas objects are substantial, concrete, solid, material. Gender as gesture is alive; gender as an object, one would presume, less so. But the congruence between understanding gender as an object and gender as a gesture is that in this case both views of gender were presented as if they had a meaning that language had no part in mediating. That is, both gesture and object were understood to speak for themselves. What meaning did the dress have for the defense lawyers? For those assembled in the courtroom? And for the jury? That meaning gathered momentum and strengthened with the object’s repeated invocation, as the green dress and the high-heeled boots were mentioned hundreds of times during the trial. One would perhaps have to look to a rape trial to find such analogously scrupulous and obsessive legal attention to what the victim had been wearing before the assault, the meticulous attempt to discern just how “provocative” that dress might have been.
In court, the green dress is lifted carefully out of the bag, in a gesture that looked to my eyes more like fear than reverence: less how you’d handle a precious, breakable thing, more how you would lift a wild animal that was unconscious but not all the way dead. As if that object, which was once almost-animate once animated on Latisha’s body, had a power that was not quite extinguished by the death of the one who once wore it, the one who wore it once. And the power that it had was the ability to confer gender, to enact gender, to become gender itself. Latisha’s gender was not a matter of her sexed body, but rather the conjoined effect of her bodily movement and the material signifiers of femininity that were worn on, though not part of, her body. The earrings. The makeup. The scarf. The dress and the boots. The defense attorneys invoke them over and over: the dress and the boots, the dress and the boots. As witnesses were asked again and again: Larry King, did you see him wear a dress? Where? When? How many times? What did it look like? What color was it? The boots? What color were they? Were they past the ankle? Up to the knee? How high up the leg did they go? How high were the heels? Two inches? Three? Four? At least one of the students in testimony, when asked about Larry’s dress, corrects the defense attorney: I was talking about the way he dressed, not a dress. I never seen no dress. The student makes it clear that when he is talking about Latisha he is describing an overall fact of her being, a style, rather than a particular object, a dress. But the defense demands that the dress be documented and detailed and recalled and then produced, so it could tell its particular kind of truth.
If the dress was an object that was understood to be saying something about gender and also about sexuality, a something said through simply its physical presence, its objecthood, the question becomes: What was it that the dress said? What message did it offer so wordlessly yet so eloquently that at least one person in the courtroom gasped as the dress was brought out of the paper evidence bag? The gasp would seem to be a response to something surprising, shocking, or out of place in the presence of the dress. The dress in the hands of the defense attorneys speaks its meaning forth in this way, as an object that names Latisha as a culpable subject, announcing her perversion.
But the dress was held in other hands as well. And spoke other meanings when traveling through those other hands. What meaning did it have for Latisha? One child gave testimony about the moment when their teacher, Dawn Boldrin, made a gift of the dress to Latisha.
Q. by Defense Attorney Scott Wippert: Did she give it to Larry in front of everyone or did Larry get it from her and then tell others about it?
Andrea: No. She had given it to him like in a bag. I think it was before class like.
Q: In a bag, is that what you said?
A: I think.
Q: Do you know what kind of bag it was?
A. It was like a plastic bag. I think she had it in there. She didn’t give it to him openly. It was like in a bag like, “Oh, here you go.”
Q: Okay. But you learned that from Larry?
A: Yeah, I saw it, so I was like, “Oh, okay.”
Q: Okay. So if she gave it to him in a bag, how did you see it? Did Larry pull it out and show people?
A: Like I said, he pulled it out, but he wasn’t like telling everyone like, “Oh, look.” He was just like looking at it like smiling and talking to Miss Boldrin. And people would comment like, “Oh, that’s a nice dress,” like—it was just like that.1
The witness describes the moment that the green dress is handed over to Latisha. It is a gift from her teacher, and from her teacher’s daughter, who had worn the dress to homecoming and would not wear it again because, as Boldrin put it, “Everybody knows you don’t re-use your dress.” Latisha is gifted the dress through this hand-me-down ritual, which includes it within, rather than setting it outside of, the lines of transmission through which femininity is generationally taught and conferred, gifted and imposed. And the dress is an object that is soaked with meaning, tiny in size and heavy with significance, in the school and also in the courtroom. As Merleau-Ponty writes, discussing objects and their transmission of meaning: “The significance of a thing inhabits that thing as the soul inhabits the body: it is not behind appearances. . . . Prior to and independently of other people, the thing achieves that miracle of expression: an inner reality which reveals itself externally, a significance which descends into the world and begins its existence there, and which can be fully understood only when the eyes seek it in its own location.”2 In this case, the location of the thing was inside another thing. The dress was inside a bag, not the brown paper evidence bag of the courtroom but a brightly colored bag in which Dawn had placed her daughter’s dress so that she might bring it to school for Latisha. It was a pink bag with leopard print and a boa-like trim on the top. The object it contained sat inside it, with more than one meaning, more than two, full of them, replete with them. Even the bag that held the dress, functioning as a vehicle to carry the recently discarded and soon-to-be-beloved object from Dawn Boldrin’s house to her classroom, refused to speak singular meaning. It was, at once, whispering its discretion and shouting its fabulousness.
Bramson: I am holding up in front of you a green dress. Do you recall this?
Boldrin: I do.
In the witness box, Boldrin starts to weep.
Boldrin: I do, yes. It was my daughter’s tenth grade homecoming dress.
Bramson: Are you okay?
Boldrin: Yeah, I’m okay. I’m sorry.
[Pause.]
Boldrin: Yeah. You know. Girls.3
As she tries to recover herself, dabbing at her eyes with Kleenex, Boldrin apologizes for losing her composure, an apology and an explanation contained in the single word. Girls. Girls will be girls. Girls (female gendered beings) will be girls (overcome with emotion). Weepy. Stricken. She names herself as a girl, apologizing to the defense attorney who is a girl, in describing her efforts as she and her own girl helped Latisha become a girl. Boldrin continues:
Boldrin: My daughter gave that dress to Larry. I gave it to him, she gave him the dress.
Bramson: It was from her and you were the one who delivered it?
Boldrin: Yes.
Bramson: It was a long time ago, but do you remember when?
Boldrin: I don’t know. I’m an English teacher not a math teacher. . . . It was the Friday before.4
As Boldrin speaks, crying is heard in the gallery. Another “girl.” It is Kendra, Brandon’s mother, weeping.
Boldrin: This is the picture of Larry holding the dress. I took it with my cell phone and sent it to my daughter because he wanted to thank her for giving him the dress.5
Boldrin is a girl transmitting thanks from one girl to another. The picture is projected onto the screen set up in the courtroom. Latisha, smiling, holding up a green homecoming dress. An expression of joy and gratitude. Boldrin explains that she sent the photograph so that her daughter could see Latisha’s happiness at receiving the gift. Robyn Bramson begins to cry.
Bramson: Did you say that you . . . so you took the photograph on your cell phone?
Boldrin: Yes.
Bramson: And then did you send it to your daughter?
Boldrin: I sent it to my daughter because my daughters—I don’t know. I think as a mother I tried to raise my daughters to be good people, and I had noted to them why Larry was in foster care because he was being beat for being—6
Boldrin is cut off by an objection from the prosecution, an objection that is itself interrupted by a sound in the gallery. Gregory King, Latisha’s adoptive father, stands up, slams down his seat, and stomps out of the courtroom. Once again, the transgression is unspeakable, unable to be heard, will not be countenanced by Gregory King. His departure from the courtroom, abrupt, violent, is an attempt to stop or squelch the invocation of queerness that was about to issue from the witness box, even as his act mimetically reproduces the accusation it was meant to silence. Larry was in foster care because he was being beat for being . . .
The judge sustains the objection, and chastises Boldrin for being nonresponsive.
Judge Campbell: Ms. Boldrin, you need to just answer the questions.
Gregory King walks back into the courtroom and barks to the rest of the King family, his wife, her mother, and their other child: “We are leaving the courtroom. Let’s go.” All the Kings file out. As they exit, Latisha’s grandmother says something to a girl in the very back row of the gallery, a hissed or muttered something that I cannot hear from where I am seated. The girl starts crying. After the Kings depart, the courtroom is quiet, except for the girl in the back row, sobbing. She is Dawn Boldrin’s daughter. She is led out of the courtroom.
Dawn Boldrin noted that the green dress was very small because her daughter was very small. “She’s a double zero so that lets you know how little he was,” Boldrin said, referring to Latisha.7 The matter of Latisha’s physical size was brought up frequently by the prosecution. The defense did not much remark on Latisha’s physical size, but emphasized repeatedly that she “took up a lot of room.” At 5’4’’ and 111 pounds, Latisha was small. Certainly much smaller than Brandon McInerney. But her presence was characterized throughout the testimony as big. She was described as taking up a lot of space. And this taking up of space was not a fact of her physical size, but an effect of magnification enacted by her gestural life. Some of this largeness was undoubtedly projection; the gendered style of her embodiment made her “stick out” and marked her as an object of fascination and contempt and pity and fear and hatred. Those who hated or feared her justified that hatred and fear by constituting her as big, as threatening.8 In characterizing Latisha’s presence as big and her gender presentation as threatening, those who were aggressive toward her were constituting their own aggression as defensive, as we have already seen. But part of that becoming larger, of exceeding her physical size, came from Latisha herself. Many teachers and students described Latisha’s behavior as changing in the ten days before her death. This behavior included wearing girls’ shoes and eye shadow, and possibly hair gel, but also exceeded the physical objects that metonymically came to be her gender. The witnesses at the trial did not give a unified account of this change, either its source or nature, but Latisha was described as transforming into a person who was newly confident, proud, unashamed, bold, standing up to those who were teasing and bullying her.
What does it mean to take up a lot of room? And how do we make determinations of size?9 Merleau-Ponty has much to say on the matter of size, on the impossibility and necessity of determining what one’s size is, where size is an experiential rather than a physical fact. We might see Freud as continually addressing the same question in the psychic realm—what is my true size? For the psychoanalyst and the phenomenologist both, the question of one’s true size is always a matter of one’s relation to other things and other people. And when we cannot figure out the answer to this question—what is my true size?—we suffer. And sometimes we cause others to suffer. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the size of a person or an object is never singularly true, giving as one example “the road close up is not more true than the road far away.” Because of his fascination with the impossibility of this determination, Merleau-Ponty was compelled by those instances in which it is difficult or impossible to determine what a thing’s true size is. He suggests that children, too, are compelled by such difficult-to-determine objects. In his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” he uses the example of the moon as such an object. It is something that exists for the child, is perceived by the child, yet exists outside of her, at the outer limits of her world, beyond the reach of her grasp. She can neither move closer nor farther away from it; she cannot change its relative size, its appearance, by changing her own relation to it, in the way that she would with a house or a stone or a cat. The moon is a thing presenting a certain fixity that, paradoxically, gives it the appearance of movement. As I walk down a country road at night, the moon that illuminates the gravel in front of me seems to follow me, accompanying my movement with its own and stopping when I pause.
Merleau-Ponty calls the moon and other objects of this kind an “ultra-chose,” an ultra-thing. The word describes things that are present to a child but ambiguously so, within her perception but out of her grasp. He draws the concept from Henri Wallon in order to challenge Jean Piaget and counter a representationalist model of the childhood mind. Ultra-things are things that appear, but outside of the orbit and beyond the reach of rationalist and familiar explanations of the world with which the child is familiar. He writes: “Borrowing from a profound notion introduced by Wallon, the presence in the child’s experience of ‘ultra-things’ which are certain beings that exist for children but are not within their scope or reach. Such beings are not fully grasped by simply looking at them, and children cannot change them by willing or by moving their bodies. In short, they are things that they are not able to fully observe. The significance of this notion has not been fully recognized.”10 The child is not able to fully observe an ultra-thing, he cannot test or manipulate it. It remains in some essential way out of his grasp and out of his comprehension. The earth and the sky are exemplary “ultra-things’” for the child. An ultra-thing is something in which a rational account cannot quite compel my belief. Children can believe in such things “only with their lips,” Merleau-Ponty says. The object itself might be familiar, like the moon, but the explanation for its existence or behavior will not be.
So an ultra-thing can be an object like the moon, and more expansively a being, like the child that my parent once was. As he expands the roster of things that might be classified as ultra-things, Merleau-Ponty also enlarges the circle of those who might perceive ultra-things, suggesting that adults, too, have them. And like the sky for the child, or the child that her parent once was, the ultra-thing for an adult is outside of his grasp, essentially opaque to him, elides his rational thought, and is only believed in “with [the] lips.” But the ultra-things that adults have are neither objects nor beings but states. The paradigmatic examples, Merleau-Ponty says, are one’s birth and one’s death. The ultra-thing is that which forms the very outside edges of the horizon of his experience.
In the King case, we might consider that the norms of gender function as an ultra-chose. It is a thing about which the child does not have a thesis, an explanation. It is a thing that is inescapably present, that forms the horizon of his experience, yet is not manipulable, not capable of being moved under his control. It is present everywhere, seemingly inescapable, yet the rules that govern its appearance, division, and enforcement are obscure. Latisha King clearly had an experience of her own gender, a felt sense that compelled a performance of gender that was at odds with the dictates of her family and her school. And her performance of gender breached the rules that her teachers and classmates seemed so eager to enforce. Was Latisha, then, childlike in her relation to gender? Was she operating without a thesis about it, while those around her understand gender in a more adult way? I would suggest that, in fact, the opposite may be true. Gender for Latisha may have been a realm characterized by a kind of magical thinking to which Merleau-Ponty refers when he describes the ultra-thing. That magical thinking would believe the heeled boots to have the power to confer gender, to gift their wearer with girlhood. Or inexpertly applied eye shadow. Or a green homecoming dress. But the response of the adults around her showed that she was not wrong in this thinking. Indeed the drive to regulate Latisha, to prevent her performance of her feminine gender, and to insist that Larry was a boy not a girl, thus must not be allowed to put shadow on his eyelids gel in his hair heels on his feet, demonstrates that the adults were engaging in thinking that was still more magical than the gender-variant child they were trying to straighten out, and that they clung to this thinking without the guidance of an internal conviction of a felt sense of gender spurring them on. That is: the adults seemed simultaneously convinced that Larry was a boy and thus could not wear girl’s boots and that those gendered objects were totems invested with such power to transform their wearer and also to contaminate those nearby that those objects needed to be forbidden. “Larry,” said one teacher, “needed to be stopped.”
Gender may be more of an ultra-thing for the adults who sought to police it than it was for Latisha, who lived in and through it. That the teachers who policed her gender also have a gender was invisible to them. The contention in this case was that when Larry walked down the hallway in his boots, he was making an issue of his gender. As Samantha, Brandon McInerney’s girlfriend, said, Larry put on a dress and in doing so “Larry was shoving it in everyone’s face.” The dress became the gender; the gender became an object; the object became a weapon. Latisha may have thought magically about her own gender, but the myths of gender under which the adults in her life operated are much more pernicious and less attuned to the realities of gender than Latisha’s fantasies. Those myths: that gender is binary, and that any deviation from that binary is wrong, and bad, and dangerous. And that it was Latisha who represented the danger and not those who sought to stop her, fully and finally.
What can we say about the response to Latisha’s gender presentation within the school and its representation in the courtroom? And what can we say about what it should have been? Phenomenology is generally understood to belong to the province of the descriptive rather than the normative, the is rather than the should. The question then becomes, how can phenomenology grasp hold of the ethical? What might it have to offer the philosophical enterprise of thinking through ethics, if it is not able to supply norms? This question of phenomenology’s proper objects, or ethics’ proper methods, is raised by much recent work in phenomenology, as we can see in recent work on Husserl’s ethics,11 in Lester Embree’s volume on the phenomenology of moral philosophy, and in Kevin Hermberg and Paul Gyllenhammer’s still more recent collection Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics, in which John Drummond crisply describes the matter thusly: “One could argue that phenomenology cannot bridge the gap between the descriptive and the normative, and can therefore tell us nothing about ethics.”12 He does not agree of course; rather, he describes the problem in a nutshell. If the phenomenological method is description, it is not a sufficiently wide arena in which to consider questions of the ethical if the method were merely description. The question then becomes, what might those descriptive practices offer if we want to use phenomenology in order to gain traction on ethical issues? If we have ethical questions that we want to pose to phenomenology, what can phenomenology do with description to help us engage the ethical?
One way to think this is to consider the ways in which the merely descriptive always carries a normative valence, even if that normative charge is obscured. We can see this at work in the visual realm, which one could convincingly argue has historically been phenomenology’s favored mode of investigation. The specular may be the most common method—and arguably the most familiar object—of phenomenology. The realm of the specular, though, is never purely, or even mostly, about appearance understood as either a passive taking-in or a neutral, perspectival-less unfolding. Because seeing is always embodied, power, relation, violence, ethics, and intersubjectivity are there, from the start. And surely even before that.
One of the things phenomenology teaches us is that observation, that description, is just as likely to get us to a place of unknowing as to a place of knowing. Phenomenology as method can lead us to a place of greater knowing, but it can also have as one of its effects a loosening or an undoing of what we know. To withhold one’s judgment, to refuse to rush to a conclusion, to resist one’s habits of certainty—these all seem to be strategies keyed to the limits of knowing, which are always at stake in unknowing, yet there is something more, something additional, at work in it. Unknowing is not merely a marking of the limits of knowledge, but a mode or an activity that involves or engages something beyond that marking of limits. Unknowing is not only a negative withholding, but also an active—if not quite affirmative—something, and it is temporally stranger than uncertainty. To be uncertain is to vacillate on the threshold of certainty, while to unknow is to revise or undo knowledge that I already have, perhaps to question the epistemological regime that brought that knowing about in the first place.
Another answer to the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the ethical is gestured to by Werner Marx, whose book Towards a Phenomenological Ethics asks if there might be an approach to ethics that is nonmetaphysical. He dispatches with the descriptive versus normative impasse by suggesting that the object to be defined can be an ethos: “One can forgo the name ethics and be content to speak of ‘descriptions of ethos.’ . . . We find the appropriate method of describing an ethos within the realm of non-metaphysical thought in a phenomenological explication.”13 As Marx explains, when we describe, we are not marking down facts or events but finding, also, something else. “For phenomenology may not simply ‘depict’ what is experienced in each respective case. It rather attempts to interpret a structural whole in such a way that it does not grasp an individual entity, but the being of this entity.”14 This distinction needs some parsing, since it is not clear what inquiry after the being of the entity would look like, apart from and other than ontological inquiry, or how we would have escaped the realm of metaphysics with this kind of inquiry. Marx suggests that the end goal of a phenomenological ethics is the cultivation of compassion—of compassion for others, a fellow-feeling with our fellow beings. But there is, too, a hint of reflexivity about the suggestion, that compassion also turns inward, that contemplation of my own mortality might also lead me to be more compassionate toward myself.
What, then, is a description of ethos? The example Marx gives is the human experience of mortality, which we experience as one side of our Being. In this view, I am always reaching toward mortality but never touching it; it is the inner lining of my experience of life, where the separation between the two divides me into distinct regions of being. We are able to experience that mortality through our human comportment, emphasizing the centrality of the body in all of our relations. Comportment is what joins me to the world, and it is equally what joins me with other, whom I then experience as the other side of my Being, as sociality. These twin poles of human existence, mortality and sociality, are, Marx claims, joined in the human person by comportment, which offers access to and is the medium of both. And sociality becomes something that is indistinguishable from life itself.
After the trial was over, several jurors spoke on camera about the reasons they were unwilling to find Brandon guilty of first-degree murder and had wished instead to find him guilty of second-degree murder or of voluntary manslaughter. Rosalie Black, an alternate juror, stated, “I don’t think it was first degree murder. It was premeditated.”15 With that single statement Black pithily demonstrated that she did not comprehend the most fundamental matter the jury was charged to consider, since a determination of the latter, premeditation, in this case necessitated the former, a finding of first-degree murder. The instructions to the jury did not ask them to adjudicate guilt or innocence; innocence is not a plausible plea when the victim is unarmed, unaware, and shot in the back of the head, twice, in front of a room full of witnesses. Rather, the jury was to determine what kind of guilty verdict would be returned. In the end, the hung jury and the resulting mistrial ensured that no kind of guilty verdict was returned.
In this frank conversation among jurors, extraordinarily captured by director Marta Cunningham in the documentary film Valentine Road, three jurors described what it was that led them to decide, or to refrain from deciding, in the way they had. They were at some pains to communicate that it was not homophobia that determined their decision. The problem with Larry, they explained, was not that he was gay. They knew that Brandon had no problem with Larry’s sexual orientation because Brandon had no problem with Marina, another student at E.O. Green, who was gay. When the administrators approached Marina and told her she was not allowed to hold hands with her girlfriend at school, she stopped holding hands with her girlfriend. “Marina got it,” said one of the jurors, implying that they, too, had no problem with Marina’s sexual orientation, and thus, transitively, no problem with anyone else’s. Then two of them interject in unison: “Larry didn’t get it.”
What was the nature of this “it” that Latisha didn’t get? One might assume that it was the injunction, punishable by violence or even death, against a certain kind of self-expression, that the “good” queer student of color was not punished because she knew when not to express herself, and the “bad” one was because she did not know, or refused to know, or did not let that knowing circumscribe her expression. Yet the jurors were objecting to something still more concrete than this. “It was the high heels, it was the makeup,” said one. Thus, it was not the ontological fact of Larry’s “gayness” that constituted a problem for either Brandon McInerney or the jurors. It was Latisha’s unwillingness to squelch its expression in her gestural life. In that, it was her defiance.16 But perhaps even more determinatively: it was the objects, Latisha’s objects. It was the high heels, it was the makeup.
In the film, the juror names the objects that were paraded solemnly in front of the jury box, the objects with their unmistakable connotation of gender transgression, a naming that confirms the defense decision to show those objects as a canny one. It was those objects that did not just stand in for but actually became gender and also its transgression which are named as the reason, the problem, the thing that turned both Brandon and the jury against Latisha. Because Latisha didn’t get it, she was a problem. Because Latisha would not take up less space, she was a problem. Because she was a trans youth of color, she was a problem. As one juror understood it, Latisha’s form of dress was actually a form of taunting Brandon. Since the school administrators did not share this view of Latisha’s gender expression, would not “help” Brandon with this “harassment,” the juror explained, “He was solving a problem.” And as Brandon himself put it, in a statement that demonstrates in one turn the social sanction with which he operated leading up to and during the killing and the dispatch with which he sealed Latisha into perfect objecthood before doing so: “I felt like it would make everyone’s life at school better. I felt like I was solving a problem and doing the right thing. I didn’t even think of killing Larry, just of getting rid of him, and that’s how I would get rid of him.” The question then emerges: What environment, what context within the school, would lead Brandon McInerney to the conclusion that he was “doing the right thing” in shooting Latisha King?
The testimony from the teachers at E. O. Green Junior High gives some clue.
In at least two instances, teachers made note of Latisha’s appearance in a way that, again, transformed gender expression into aggressive behavior. One teacher, Debi Goldstein, offered the following testimony:
Q: Was there a lot of talk going around the school about Larry King?
A: I did not know the boy’s name.
Q: Was there rumbling about a boy who chose to express himself?
A: Yes. Some of the students and teachers were upset about it. . . .
Q: Can you tell us the type of things that you heard about this boy who was choosing to express his potential sexual identity through dress?
Here, as throughout, we see a conflation of sexual identity and gender identity. It passed unremarked, but the prosecutor objected to the last question on the grounds of relevance, and the objection was sustained. The defense tried again:
Q: In your opinion, as the teacher there, did you think that there was anything regarding this boy expressing his sexuality and dressing in the manner that he was that was disrupting to the school?
A: Yes it was.
Q: How?
A: Because the teachers were upset.
Q: Were students upset?
A: The teachers were upset because it was distracting.
Q: Was he a disruption?
A: Yes. He went too far.
Q: And what is it that you saw or noticed that gave you the opinion that he was a disruption?
A: I had an epiphany a week before the shooting. I saw this pretty little girl talking with the students. She had short hair and nice earrings and cute jeans and a beautiful little figure and then she turned around and I saw it was a boy. And I saw that this is Larry, and this was what all the rumblings were about, and now I understand.
Q: Like a fifteen-year-old girl would dress?
A: More like a high school or college student. He dressed to be sexy.
Q: Can you say how he was dressing more like a high school or a college girl?
A: It was the way he put everything together. The way everything was, to his hair to his clothing to his boots his finger polish. It was more than any of the girls would do at that age at our school.
Q: So it was more than any other girl at the school?
A: Right.
Q: When you were at E. O. Green did you ever see any girls dressed like that?
A: Yes. When they would go for graduation they would dress up really nice and beautiful. But on a regular school day they don’t.
In the scene Debi Goldstein describes, she is approaching a girl talking to some other students, a girl whose appearance she showers with superlatives: she is a pretty little girl, her jeans are cute, her earrings are nice, she has a beautiful little figure. The moment of disorientation and discovery comes when this girl turns around and, Goldstein says, “I saw it was a boy.” This girl was talking with her classmates, was not causing trouble; there was no disruption. The disruption occurs only once Goldstein realizes: this is Larry. She has to reverses her prior assessment of the scene and see it differently. The tableau that initially struck her as unremarkable, innocuous, is now revised, and becomes a problem. She does not single out one element of Latisha’s attire or behavior and name it distressing; rather, she is distressed by the general gestalt of her gender presentation. As she says, “It is the way that everything was put together” that was striking about Latisha’s appearance. Note that in this moment it is not the social scene in the school that is disrupted by Latisha’s appearance, though in other moments it was. What is disrupted is Goldstein’s sense of gender propriety, her understanding of how a girl should look and how a boy should look, and the “epiphany,” in her words, that she experiences the moment when Latisha turns around, is the dis-orientation of that expectation.
I suggest that we can understand what happened in this moment as something that Husserl has called a retroactive crossing out.17 Suppose, says Husserl, I am looking at a red ball. As I look I have a sense of it, I form an understanding of not just the side of the ball that I see but the thing entire, through mostly unconscious acts of synthesis. But if I turn the ball around, or position myself so that I can look at it from another angle, I can see that the unseen face of the ball that had been turned away from me, is not red and round but in fact green and dented. In that moment, a retroactive crossing out occurs. Rather than functioning in an additive way, rather than merely giving me one more piece of information about the nature of this ball, this new perspective undoes my prior synthesis and strikes out what I thought I knew of the ball. Everything I had known before about the object becomes voided.
We might say that the girl that Debi caught sight of was subject to a retroactive crossing out. Once Debi came to the realization “it’s a boy” (Larry), the girl that she saw in front of her (Latisha) was nullified. Indeed we can see instances of this retroactive crossing out all throughout the school, as some of the students and most of the teachers refused Latisha life, withheld recognition from her, sought to void or cancel her existence. Violence against Latisha, daily teasing and name calling, shoving her into the lockers as she passed by, was part of the normative fabric of the school. In this way, Brandon’s act was the most extreme example of a process that was going on in a thousand different ways all throughout the school. And Brandon was following, rather than defying, the desires and expectations of his teachers, with their repeated incantation that Larry had to be stopped.
One teacher, Shirley Brown, testified in reply to a question about the atmosphere of danger in the school:
Q: Did you, during this period were you in fear for his safety from other boys?
A: I was fearful for his safety, yes. My comment to my principal was that if something wasn’t done soon that Larry would be taken behind the back shed of the PE area and beaten to death.
The “something” that needed to be done, however, was not an intervention on Latisha’s behalf. Latisha was, in Brown’s words “making himself a target,” and it was that self-fashioning, which she considered provocative and outrageous, that needed to be stopped. Brown testified that she saw a number of boys chasing Latisha, but that she did nothing. Boys chasing, teasing, harassing, or persecuting Latisha was not the “something” that needed stopping. After the trial was over, Shirley Brown recounted Latisha coming to her and asking for advice. “I knew his inclination. He came to discuss it with me.” Inclination: clino, to bend. She did not specify which inclination, but her response suggests that Latisha King sought Shirley Brown’s counsel because she believed that she was trans, that she felt a gathering momentum of her identity as a girl. As she recounts in Valentine Road, this is how she responded:
When Larry asked me what to do about this situation I said: nothing. What to do about this situation is nothing. And to keep it private. And to dwell upon it. Larry shouldn’t have expressed himself so blatantly, openly, transsexual. He progressed day by day in his outward appearance as a girl. I do believe in a heaven and a hell, and I do believe Larry honestly did not have a clue, honestly, the consequences of his actions. I relate to Brandon because I could see my own self being in that very same position. I don’t know if I would have taken a gun, but a good, swift kick in the butt might work really well.18
“Transsexual” here is an adjective describing dress, rather than naming an identity or gender category. “Transsexual” is a term that modifies “expression.” Nonetheless, Shirley Brown offers a name that everyone else in the courtroom was invested in withholding. She calls Latisha “transsexual,” in an act of naming that she understands to simultaneously mark Latisha as aggressive and also marks her as the proper target of aggression.
Latisha says to Shirley Brown: I am not Larry, a boy, but Latisha, a girl. What should I do? And Brown replies: Nothing. What to do about this situation is nothing. Brown acknowledges that there is a “situation” with Latisha’s gender, but it is a situation for which no action is appropriate, a situation about or in which Latisha should not act. She should do nothing, she should say nothing, and she should “dwell upon it.” It is not a dwelling in but a motionless contemplation of gender that the teacher advises, and the archaic phrasing of her counsel anticipates the biblical feel of the declamation that follows: “I believe in a heaven and a hell,” Brown states, intimating the kind of Old Testament wrath that she understands to be waiting if Latisha did not follow her advice, keep quiet, do nothing, stay a boy. Larry may believe that he is a girl, but I believe in a heaven and a hell.
If unknowing is one of the goals of a phenomenological ethos, we see here that it cannot be just any unknowing, pointing in any direction. What Shirley Brown is aiming at is to get Latisha to unknow what she believes about herself. A phenomenological ethos of unknowing must instead be reflexive, it must be my goal to unseat my own belief through the suspension of what I already think I know. For Shirley Brown, however, it is she who is the knower, and Latisha who does not know, who “honestly did not have a clue.” Brown’s belief, and her certainty, allow her to nullify Latisha, to subject her to that retroactive crossing out. That crossing out is accompanied by Brown’s revisionist fantasy of herself in the very same position as Brandon, as the agent of punishment, enforcing her own certainties about gender with a kick, an assault, a violence that thinks itself merciful, because it is a body and not a gun that is its instrument.
The mirroring between teacher and student, between Shirley Brown and Brandon McInerney, reveals the rather bland and nonspecific language about safety that permeated the trial to have been a screen discourse behind which there lay a much more pointed wish—the wish that Latisha’s gender transgressions should be punished with physical assault. Brown’s suggestion that the children were not ready for Latisha’s gender can thus be seen as a projection of her own discomfort and rage. The school must be safe, made safe from the ostensible danger of Latisha, the unspecified threat that she was understood to represent to unspecified victims. Shirley Brown wanted to beat Latisha up so that the school could be safe, a safety whose purview is thus shown never to have included Latisha herself. And Brandon’s discomfort and rage can be seen still more clearly as what it straightforwardly announced itself to be: a response that was not just individual but, importantly, collective, ready to act on the only partially submerged hatred emanating from those who saw Latisha, finally, as the greatest threat to the “safety” of the school.