Trans-exclusionary dogma is the political quicksilver of our moment. Impossibly dynamic, these politics can assume the shape of any container—policies, religious beliefs, nationalist sentiment, laws—they inform. Indeed, it is the deeply mercurial nature of trans-exclusionary perspectives that makes them so pernicious. They can undergird, at once, calls for a putatively stabilizing return to traditional gender roles in the home and the state and demands for greater legal and policy-based protections for girls and women in sport, employment, and state services; anti-colonial critique and imperialist nationalisms; and biological essentialisms and the explosion of gender norms. To account for the breadth and diversity of trans-exclusionary politics of various kinds would require several years' worth of additional special issues, but even then, because these politics are so labile, so responsive to the conservative political whims of the moment, we have no doubt but that they will continue to take new form and shape...
Introduction: Trans-Exclusionary Politics by Other Means
Serena Bassi is assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University. Their work interrogates modern racial, gendered, and sexual formations by focusing on literature in translation. They have published in journals including Translation Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Signs.
Greta LaFleur is associate professor of American studies at Yale University. They are the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (2018) and coeditor of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (2021) and “The Science of Sex Itself,” a forthcoming special issue of GLQ.
Serena Bassi, Greta LaFleur; Introduction: Trans-Exclusionary Politics by Other Means. TSQ 1 August 2022; 9 (3): 460–462. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9836106
Download citation file:
Advertisement
