This special issue began with a simple provocation: “Where do we find the transvestite and the transsexual?” The ascendance and mainstreaming of transgender and its offshoots in its Anglo-American idiom represent more than a shift in nomenclature. While transsexual and transvestite were central categories that organized trans experience across a wide array of geographies, genders, and racial and class coordinates during the twentieth century, these categories have receded into the background of anglophone activism and academia. Trans studies, which has been dominated by US and English-based scholarship, has largely moved on from transsexuals in favor of ostensibly more open-ended and proliferating models of gender variance. Transvestites, for their part, have never occupied the center of the field of trans studies. Rendered anachronistic, both groups are more vulnerable than ever to long-standing stigmas with a new temporal twist. They are viewed as either tragic figures who could never be their “true”...

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