In 2016 the North Carolina legislature passed the first so‐called bathroom bill in the United States. It spurred massive response, including a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ban on holding championship events in the state. A year later, the bill was repealed and replaced with a compromise bill that eliminated some of the original's most noxious elements, thereby causing the NCAA to repeal its own ban. More than any kind of realization that trans people were simply going about their business to do their business, North Carolina's repeal and replacement was almost certainly instigated by the economic losses the state suffered as a result of the NCAA's ban.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and bathroom bills, along with a slew of other antitrans measures, have proliferated in the United States, driven by a wave of populist nationalism that continues to pummel trans people in the churning undercurrents of straw man fallacies. As a figure of all that is supposedly wrong with our current culture, trans people have been significantly affected by recent antitrans backlash: many of us have been pushed farther away from access to necessary health care, further displaces from public spaces, prevented from playing certain organized sports, or prohibited from accessing legal documentation changes. And somehow, we continue to circle back to the bathroom as a site of contestation, where ontological ground cracks at its threshold: beingness and humanness as attributions that operate through categories of ability (able‐bodied), race (white), and gender (man/woman) all collide in stark relief to what might be called access.
In their short intervention published in the “Trans Antagonisms” special section of this issue, Simon(e) van Saarloos reminds us, “The material exteriority of trans and disability famously overlaps in ungendered accessible toilets. Disabled men and disabled women aren't awarded with the normative gender binary, inviting inside those who fall outside that division.” Disability in this case blocks inclusion in the normative gender binary and, by default, allowance into gender‐segregated bathrooms.
That material exteriority of trans and disability likewise intersects with race at the site of racially segregated bathrooms. I'm reminded of my (white) mother's stories of the segregated bathrooms in the southern United States of her youth and young adulthood, often marked “Ladies” or “Women,” “Men,” and “Colored.” As Black feminist scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Evelyn Hammonds, and Sylvia Wynter have taught us, the biocentric designation of race is (in) the break between human and gender: Black people have been disallowed access to the attribution of human in Western science, education systems, and the list goes on. Students of color are disproportionately diagnosed with disabilities while at the same time less likely to receive the services they need and more likely to face violence in educational settings (Erevelles and Minear 2010). In health care, Black disabled women were used as experimental test sites for the development of vesicovaginal fistula repair, a “fix” ultimately credited to J. Marion Sims rather than the women whose bodies were tortured in the process of developing an entire field of Western medicine. As Rachel Dudley (2012) writes, Sims's four years of tortuous experimentation on disabled Black women served to “transform a condition representing an impediment on the slave plantation into a kind of medical entrepreneurship and a discrete branch of medicine.” The transformation from incontinent (unable to prevent the leakage of urine) and unproductive (unable to reproduce in the service of capital) to “cured” was made possible through excruciating and repetitive abuse, a series of physical and psychical traumas that are incurable.
The idea of cure operates through a framework of pathology that also incorporates both trans and disabled lives. The series of binaries that “cure” produces narrate the complexities of dis/abled embodiments as oppositional, whether chronic or temporary: well/sick; disabled/able‐bodied; wrong/fixed. Yet, even while trans and disability are entangled, J. Logan Smilges and Slava Greenberg stress in their introduction that the “closeness” of their associated field formations often goes unnamed. The work in this special issue names and explores some of those entanglements, offering the brackets between trans and crip, trans[]crip, as an invitation for elaborating the specificities of pain, longing, joy, care, and violence that trans and crip people experience—all that is attenuated when terms are combined and compressed without the texture of nuance. The inclusion of [] between trans and crip also calls on other instances of trans theorizing that incorporate the use of typographical symbols as openings for thoughtful connection.
In the introduction to the “Trans‐” issue of WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly in 2008, the editors called attention to the conceptual work performed by the prefix trans‐ itself, meaning “to cross.” Adding a hyphen after trans, they proposed, marked a distinction between the “implied nominalism of ‘trans’” (that is, trans as a name for an object that “trans studies” studied) and the “explicit relationality of ‘trans‐,’ which remains open‐ended and resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix” (Stryker, Currah, and Moore 2008: 11). In other words, the hyphen marked the difference between studying “transgender” as a thing and studying the process of how gender boundaries are crossed over, or “transed.” In 2015 Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein posed trans*, adopting the asterisk to symbolically mark something that is undefined and ultimately unnamable. As they write, the asterisk is “a diminutive astral symbol miming the starfish's limby reach” that “follows trans and attaches to it, attaches to something else” (198). The asterisk symbolizes a fecund space of generative possibility, where ontology—beingness—might be remapped and where new ontologies, enlivened by the possibilities of transing whatever suffix trans‐ attaches to, might emerge.
Yet the brackets in trans[]crip seem, to me, to do different work than the hyphen or the asterisk. Rather than enlivening trans by operating as a “spiky allergenic pollen” (198), the pairing of the open and close brackets offers some measure of balance to whatever text is on each side. Instead, like the asterisk, the bracket pair is an experimental symbol representing an excess beyond what is nameable, but it feels born with the intention of connecting specific bodies of thought, types of bodies, kinds of living. Rather than flattening either trans or crip by potentially compressing their specificity, as in transcrip, the brackets allow for both connection and break, nuance and ineffability.
Throughout the issue, the framing work of trans[]crip also facilitates analyses of embodied/experiential excess beyond what can be described through the language of intersection or integration. In “Mad Trans Difficulty,” for example, Drew McEwan writes, “Although I designate trans as a mad site by social definition, I also acknowledge the trans folks who, like me, experience both transness and madness. Although always integrated in a singular subjective experience, these are not always easily reducible to one and the same.” As McEwan intimates about irreducibility, the [] allows for relation without disavowal. I am connecting as well to Alexandre Baril's (2015: 71) insistence that his gender “dysphoria is as psychologically disabling as [his] other mental disabilities.” Gender dysphoria—or bad trans feelings more generally—can be disabling, but it is not a disability, per se; even as transness and madness coexist through pathologization and social definition, they needn't be lived as two intersecting but nonetheless distinct pathologies to be cured.
Trans[]crip acknowledges the irreducibility of trans and crip into each other, allowing neither to become a constellating identity point with fixed meaning. Time changes our bodies and their attendant capacities; not all environments are accessible as our bodies change; we exist amid movement and are in motion whether we are able to physically direct our movements or not. This points, as well, to how the notion of integrative access often fails. As Smilges discusses in Crip Negativity (2023), being included or allowed to integrate into normative systems certainly does not transform the ableist structural foundations of those systems. Further, as Smilges and Greenberg assert in their introduction to this special issue, “Taking a lead from the disability justice activist Mia Mingus, we believe that access without reconciliation—whether to a room, building, or field—is not access worth having.”
To get to the all‐gender accessible bathroom from my office in my academic building, which I am thrilled exists, I start by walking the length of a hallway and descending sixteen stairs, followed by a 1.5‐minute walk (when moving briskly), which includes, in the final stretch, moving down a hallway where city and border patrol cops are often walking through with handguns strapped to their waists. If one has a physical disability that necessitates use of a wheelchair or other assistive device, the elevator would add time to one's journey, and moving through the halls may be more difficult. If one is an undocumented trans student seeking to use that bathroom, how are access and safety operating? Access is fraught, multilayered, differential.
As recently as the 2023 convening, my primary field's national gathering, the National Women's Studies Association Annual Conference, had notes about required masking to protect all attendees from COVID‐19 transmission, including immunocompromised participants. All‐gender bathrooms were going to be available. Yet masking was neither the norm nor enforced in any way. The all‐gender bathroom was indicated by a sign with the text “All‐Gender Restroom” with a figure in a wheelchair next to it. The new signage precisely covered the original and included the same color font. It was neat and exact in how it covered the word Men with a skirtless figure next to it. But as I looked to my left, there was another bathroom that maintained its original sign: the text Women with a skirted figure next to it. As had been the same when I'd last attended in the late 2010s, only the men's restroom was changed to “All Gender.” What does this say about how Man is neutralized as “All”? What does this say about access? Whose access are we protecting and why?
This issue will be in print soon after an antitrans, antidisabled, antiwoman authoritarian government takes new shape in the United States. It will likely be shipped out as the United States continues funding a genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, or if there is a successful ceasefire between writing and print, where mass debilitation has nonetheless been occurring for decades and has recently, once again, been punctuated by mass murder, mass dispossession of Palestinian lands and livelihoods, and mass decimation of transportation, healthcare, housing, and education infrastructure. Perhaps what trans[]crip as a framework might offer in the encounter between trans and crip is a more nuanced closeness that better allows us to entangle the kind of ethical lives we want to live with the kinds of access we have or don't have to life.
