I went to graduate school for many reasons, not all of which I was conscious of at the time. Toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I had been a bit listless. Coursework in history and French had held my attention, but living in Canada's capital city had disillusioned me to the empty liberal promises of the grown-up office jobs my peers were landing. I contemplated applying to law school but resented the idea of taking the law so seriously. Around that time my mentor, a historian of sexuality, called me into her office and slyly asked where I was going to apply for PhDs, as if it were a matter of fact that I would. And before I could shrug, she supplied an answer: the United States. There, I could study the history of sexuality and queer theory, two subjects I had fastened myself to in her classes. I remember walking home that day, a little wide-eyed at twenty years old, thinking she had changed the course of my life. I was fixated on the peculiar prospect of moving to the United States, but it was also the idea of getting a PhD itself. I grew up in a working-class family of Punjabis who had immigrated before Canada engineered its immigration policy to drain the world of its most educated. We weren't exactly the model minority trope, replete with doctorates and doctors. It was hard to see myself as a professor-to-be.
Looking back, there was a submerged notion underneath each of those thoughts: I might go to graduate school to meet trans people.
Part of the indescribable reward of working with trans graduate students is the gift of a set of experiences I didn't have while earning my PhD. When I teach specialized seminars on trans femininity, or the racial history of trans medicine, I think back on how I learned the field in two wildly asymmetrical installments. I was incredibly lucky to attend a seminar at Rutgers University in 2012–13, “Trans Studies: Beyond Homo/Hetero Normativities.” Aren A. Aizura, then a postdoctoral fellow, was building the first trans studies infrastructure at Rutgers. He generously and tirelessly led us in a yearlong exploration of trans studies that combined a wide range of disciplines. Aren's pedagogy was much more than I deserved, being an anxious big thinker—and far too closeted to admit it—ready to break any field of what I saw as its metaphysical limitations. I'm embarrassed to recall what a bad student that made me. The overly ambitious paper I delivered in the seminar hardly earned me the opportunity, but Aren mentored me in its revision, landing me my first publication in TSQ in the journal's second issue, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary.”
I self-taught my second installment of trans studies the summer after I defended my dissertation, in Jeanne Vaccaro's house in Bloomington, Indiana. I was spending the summer before starting a tenure-track job living off the scraps of the ignominiously named John Money fellowship at the Kinsey Institute. At the end of each day immersed in archival research, I'd bike back to Jeanne's house, which I was subletting. She kept an enviable academic library in her study, and I spent my evenings and weekends in a kind of monastic scholasticism while the daytime songbirds outside gave way to evening cicadas. Alone, I had a lot of time to think about how I, a putatively “cis” person, might responsibly write this trans studies book that was brewing in my research. Again, I feel compelled by embarrassment to share that detail.
How much better things are today, this abbreviated autobiography might suggest, but that's not my point. The rapid institutional visibility of trans people and trans studies has unfolded a lot like the unmitigated disaster of trans visibility in the rest of the world. We are now understood to be in the university, but it's not clear this is a happy turn of events. There are a handful of trans scholars with tenure-track positions in the United States, a number set to modestly grow in a moment when such jobs have been categorically decimated by turning universities into bloated real estate and stock market ploys. But the heart of this field, and what I imagine to be its demographic majority, is surely graduate students. I don't have data on hand, but if trans studies in the academy is a precarious field, it is one sustained by the labor of the most contingent academic workers: master's and PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and every permutation of adjunct and non-tenure-stream faculty. This comes as little surprise, for being trans is so often experienced less as an identity than a way of life, a downward mobility that makes stable employment, among most other material necessities, a rarity.
The political-economic contradictions of this moment register viscerally for those most exploited by the academic labor system, conjoined with saturating anti-trans political violence around the world. Just now when it has become routine to meet trans graduate students in anthropology, philosophy, public health, geography, neuroscience, and history—not just gender studies or English—so too has it become unclear what the low pay and milquetoast health insurance offered by US-based PhD programs can do when states may at any time move to criminalize every dimension of our lives, if not invite open violence toward us. What incentives are there for trans PhD study in the UK, where anti-trans professors struggling for even a modicum of intellectual relevancy are content to wantonly threaten graduate students with legal action for engaging in normal scholarly critique? When universities demonstrate their naked contempt of accountability over the routine harassment, abuse, and exploitation in mentoring and supervisory relationships, what are trans graduate students to do when such violence is surging off campus, too? The crisis of labor and institutional power in neoliberal higher education redounds in trans studies, inflaming the stratification of the field's practitioners, even as it paradoxically produces the meager aperture of this ostensible moment of great institutionalization.
No wonder PhD students are regularly some of the angriest critics of this journal.
Neoliberal austerity hasn't just killed liberal institutions like the university. It has taken the further step of reanimating them as zombies of capital, demanding we play along. The resulting failure of trans studies, like every single other discipline, to distribute badly needed resources in that environment is a shame I think we need to learn to wear better. I'm tempted to call it a collective shame, but in truth it's worn too unevenly at present. Will the university's tactical incorporation of trans studies prove mainly to weaponize white trans masculinity in the service of pacifying other targeted populations? Will the field's obsessive construction of itself around the image of degraded and dead Black and brown trans women ever hear a rejoinder from a critical mass of living Black and brown trans women scholars? Will the US and English-language hegemony of the field ever yield to the galaxies of thinking, writing, and organizing around the world that have no obligation to an American reference point?
These are not rhetorical questions—except when academics, as they are skillfully practiced in doing, use them to avoid answers. They are questions already being answered, in a million compelling ways, by graduate students. When I think about the very trans dilemma of needing to be a mentor to students in a way that I wasn't myself mentored, I return to a key lesson of years spent in union organizing: solidarity is a practice of collaboration and affiliation across difference, including professional power. It reminds this Capricorn that rarely are the answers I seek to be found solely within myself. And it reminds trans studies that we are academic workers with no incentive to reproduce the racialized and gendered class hierarchies of higher education.
But when it comes to the intellectual present and futures of trans studies? Let us also give thanks for the kaleidoscopic brilliance of graduate students, without whom I wouldn't be nearly as interested in the field. I hope the sharp crises of the present are real turning points for trans people and trans studies (which are denominations that need not coincide, particularly in relationships of solidarity). When the threats are so existential, and the promise of liberal institutions like the university to solve them so hollow, we have every reason to collectively transform our conditions of life and labor. Prioritizing graduate student labor, life, and spirit is the surest way I know to make something of trans studies worth fighting for.
This special issue proposes trans studies from the perspective of PhD students—and a few of their faculty collaborators. The issue's genesis lies in the transformative experiences we faculty have had in teaching graduate seminars, where we have learned from our students how to teach trans studies now that the field is too big to mount a conservative “survey.” For those of us who do trans of color work; who do not subscribe to the gender identity model of transness or its interchangeability with queer; or who work on the global South, this widening has come as a relief. An undisciplined, yet paradoxically common project of critical trans study that scales is something we have experienced in collaboration with our students. This issue is dedicated to graduate student articulations of the boldest plans possible for the field they are already building. To that end, it brings you many short and provocative entries.
This introduction bookends PhD student articles with Kadji Amin's impassioned “Whither Trans Studies?,” a galvanizing statement on what he terms the “devil's bargain” of “turning ‘trans’ into either a gerund or a prefix”—a bargain whose time is, frankly, more than up. From among the graduate students we have had the luck to work with, then, come seven bracing, whip-smart pieces. Not all the contributors would claim trans studies is their home field, which proves to be a great strength in dislodging calcified customs of thought that are a product of little more than the disciplining of the discipline. Most are working toward dissertations that, whatever forms they take, will no doubt transform the field for the better.
Shiv Datt Sharma opens with “Provincializing Trans Studies.” Calling into question the hegemony of trans as defined through the ethnocentric terms of the self-possessed Western individual, Sharma's research in South Asia asks how prevailing ways of being and knowing might flow in reverse, into the West. This is the task of provincializing trans studies, which might begin, as Sharma does, with the “hijra epistemologies” that forward an array of other textures for theorizing trans with less ontologizing pressure, like mythology, desire, addiction, or even fantasy. If trans studies can muster the courage to end its acquiescence to the emptiness of Western gender as the truth of the self, then the future that Sharma calls on, in which hijra touches trans, and not just the reverse, awaits.
Victor Ultra Omni also treats trans studies to a glimpse of its potential if it were to learn the history of the original, legendary practitioners. In “Crystal Labeija, Femme Queens, and the Future of Black Trans Studies,” Ultra Omni offers an insurgent history lesson on the emergence of the house structure in Black ballroom, an innovation of the femme queens who remain alarmingly uncredited for their world-transforming work and underestimated as both Black elders and femmes who greatly exceed the boundaries of contemporary transgender womanhood. Ultra Omni activates the archival reserves of the scene to ignite the respect they ought to command. What emerges is the possibility of a field where “Black trans femme scholars . . . and the ballroom children are encouraged to write and publish in trans studies.” We would be very lucky to earn that future.
Drawing likewise from underestimated—not “untold” or “hidden”—histories, Sooyoung Kim incisively blends ethnography, first-person expertise, and archival precision, painting a stunning portrait of the trans sex workers hiding in plain sight in South Korea's military camptowns. “Staying Backward with the History of Camptown Trans Sex Work” activates the full significance of camptown sex work's status as an “open secret” in postwar South Korea and its inflection by US imperialism. The informal but sanctioned sex economy that has provided work opportunities to trans women has likewise generated extensive social networks and access to medical care, shaping the national trans community from the bottom up. Studying trans womanhood under camptown's military and imperialist conditions, for Kim, is a crucial entry in a decolonial critique of trans studies from the standpoint of those “living underneath and beside” the field's habitually modernist subject.
In “Diphthongs: Trans and Norm,” Tatiana Avesani explains how a linguistic quirk has become the centerpiece of a stubbornly trans problem of language. A diphthong is the phonetic designation for the passage from one vowel to another: think æ or oë. The impossibility of fully representing that crossing might appear like a conventional definition of trans as a prefix for movement across that troubles its assumed point of departure and destination, preparing for their replacement with a truer or more accurate description. But Avesani is drawn to the utter failure of that linguistic idealism, even in its fanciest theoretical clothing, to make much difference in everyday life. Having grown up speaking both Italian and English, Avesani was surprised to learn that their penchant for mashing the languages together, creating a language no one could understand, was not a common custom. Within the riddle of the noncommunicability of binary language, Avesani asks of trans studies “to become a container whose insides may be used to talk about what has yet to be spoken,” or what can be spoken but not, finally, understood.
Turning to the field of philosophy, Penelope Haulotte next enumerates a compelling “Program for a Transgender Existentialism.” Critically reviewing the history and impact of trans phenomenology, Haulotte calls attention to its unfinished sketch of a transgender existentialism ensnared in persistent cisgender frames, especially medicine. In proposing that “trans people have an existential rather than eidetic unity,” Haulotte digs underneath the trap of shared essence for “a certain political responsibility that is one of the only universally shared features across trans experience.” That responsibility, Haulotte provocatively suggests, comprehends nothing less than “the material neutralization of cisgender society.”
Next, in “Materialist Girl: Toward an Anticolonial Account of Historical Trans Political Economy,” Alex Peeples argues for alliance between a global turn in trans studies—one that denudes the coloniality of trans—and a historical accounting of gender as a capitalist form of enclosure. Historicizing in this vein departs from the idealizing impulse of scholars to always rediscover trans's putative rebellion, conventionally from medical and legal discourse, or the Western gender binary. By investigating the conditions of possibility for that putative marginality in a global colonial frame, Peeples asks that trans studies confronts the uncomfortable coincidence that “it is at the same historical moment of the long eighteenth century that European-gendered imperialism is ascendant and that distinctly trans ideas begin to become evident in the archive.” Historicizing the political economy of transness is an incisive way to problematize and look further than the modernist iteration of trans that assures its political goodness by confining its dominant meaning to Euro-America of the past 150 years.
Finally, Jo Aurelio Giardini offers a second materialist entry concerning the critical potential latent to the widespread immiseration of trans life today. “Trans Life and the Critique of Political Economy” inventories a critical mass of trans Marxism and trans materialism that has largely been neglected by, or has bypassed, institutional trans studies, including this journal. Shifting the conventionally shallow grammar of gender from ideation and identity to a critique of the role of gender binary policing under capitalism illuminates a multitude of urgent trajectories for more thinking and organizing. Giardini develops four portable goals for a materialist trans theory that refrains from exceptionalizing or idealizing trans life as symbolically resistant to capital, or from supervising a free-floating notion of “norms,” preferring to energize the trans stakes of persistence under the weight of immense exploitation.
Taken together, these wide-ranging dispatches tender an unapologetic and energized trans studies alive to the rewards and urgency of overturning the tired ethnocentrism, liberal platitudes, gender-identity shell games, and duplications of queer theory that, from these graduate school perspectives, simply aren't enticing, let alone convincing or authoritative. Without resolving into a dominant geography, language, period, or even a dominant definition of subjectivity, they proffer a range of trans methods. Prominent are historicizing, materialism, anticolonial critique, and placing race and class at the heart of the field. Read closely, they perhaps also signal a certain wise pressure on the self-evident utility of trans as the inevitable or singular analytic of the field. Trans is not something shared in advance across the many sites of these graduate students' research and thinking, except perhaps as an instructive object of failure. Yet in reading this issue, I detect nothing tragic about such a withering of making trans fit everything and everywhere. On the contrary, a trans studies that learns from and supports the work of graduate students will find the next ten years of this journal to be packed with good ideas.
Postscript: Happy Birthday, TSQ
With the publication of this issue, TSQ has turned ten years old. (I will refrain from making jokes, since trans people famously don't age by any boring linear metric.) On behalf of the journal's general coeditors, there are some updates to the team to share—and a deep well of gratitude to convey.
Tania Balderas, the journal's editorial assistant, has reached the end of her time in that role. Fittingly for an issue devoted to graduate students, Tania is moving on to a dissertation fellowship at the University of New Mexico. She will be missed by us all and has left an indelible impact on TSQ, from the daily business of how the journal runs to its intellectual centers of gravity, particularly in forming lasting relationships with scholars working in Spanish and in Latin America. (A book review in this issue, for instance, is yet another fruit of that labor.) We wish Tania the very best and welcome Penelope Haulotte, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of New Mexico, who is stepping into the editorial assistant role. (Haulotte is also, fittingly, one of the authors in this issue.)
Readers have likely noticed several other changes in the composition of the TSQ team. The journal's inaugural editorial board, assembled at its launch a decade ago, served much longer than is the custom, ensuring that TSQ could find its rhythm. With immense thanks for that extended service, we are excited to work with the newly assembled board—and welcome anyone who might be interested in joining it to reach out. As we continue to imagine how a print journal could ever chase the breadth and scope of trans thinking and writing going on in the world, we are grateful to our special section editors, whose work has been enriching recent issues. Cole Rizki heads the Translation section, LaVelle Ridley is steering our Book Reviews, and Cáel Keegan is our Arts & Culture editor. Grace Lavery, who joined the general coeditors with me in 2020, has reached the end of her term, and we are immensely grateful for all the ways she complemented and strengthened our motley crew.
Finally, and with a lump in my throat, I attempt the impossible on our behalf: saying an adequate thank you to Susan Stryker. After ten-plus years in the driver's seat, as cofounder, general editor, and more recently, as executive editor, Susan is taking her leave in a retirement that the words well earned don't even begin to capture. There will be time—and pages—in future issues of TSQ to name and reflect on the decisive role that Susan has played here. She not only dreamed up the journal with Paisley Currah but also brought it into the world, secured its place, and cultivated its growth into all that it has become. All of us who donate our labor to this journal count Susan as a mentor. As anyone who has ever attended a TSQ editorial meeting can attest, that mentorship is literal when it comes to figuring out how to run this thing. But it goes much deeper: some of us were Susan's PhD students, others only in spirit. None of us would be in the position of being able to do what we do without her wisdom, counsel, and unwavering material support of our careers. Susan's keen instincts and refusal to shrink the dreams and demands of trans people are held in trust in these pages. Such monumental effort and impact strain at the limits of description, but we can be sure that they deserve lots of rest and relaxation at a distance from running an academic journal. Susan is busy on many other fronts, and we can count on her being in the TSQ neighborhood in other ways, but for now we say this from the heart: thank you.
Ten years is hard to fathom, and for so many reasons. Perhaps like some of you, one of them is that ten years ago I was some kind of queer child: knee-deep in PhD coursework, barely plugged into trans studies, and not coincidentally estranged from my own damned trans self. As I rode the train to Rutgers to that seminar I described earlier, talking with friends about the launch of this new journal we were hearing so much about, I scarcely could have imagined I would be penning the introduction to its tenth volume year. Trans studies has grown immensely this past decade, much like TSQ. (So have I, in case you were wondering.) Much feels better, or stronger, in the company we now keep. Much feels more dangerous, or more fragile than ever, now that we are lit up worldwide by advancing forces of violence and suppression. The pandemic years have been unkind to us all, and, though academic publishing is the smallest of entries in that story, the profound labor crisis that animates all we do, including running this journal, weighs on my mind on this anniversary.
Speaking for myself, I can say that I have long given up toggling back and forth between optimism and pessimism about trans life, never mind academia. I'm not sure tuning our feelings just right is the problem we face. But what has remained is a genuine pride. I am proud to play a role in this endeavor we call trans studies, one that is owned by no one, least of all the university. I am even more proud to be a trans woman of color in that work, and to be trans with you in a moment when the fervent wish of so many is that we were not. The passage of time generates certain forms of insight that historians like me collect, and never just mournfully, curiously, or with certainty about what will come next. Yet just as surely as I did not anticipate what was to come ten years ago, so too is the future unwritten—and for the better. May we greet what is to come, and write it on our terms in solidarity, never wavering in the truth that we command respect.
