Stepping back, looking outward: Situating transgender activism and transgender studies — Kris Hayashi, Matt Richardson, and Susan Stryker frame the movement

Abstract

The objective of Sexuality Research & Social Policy’s two special issues titled The State We’re In: Locations of Coercion and Resistance in Trans Policy is to highlight research that is of immediate, practical value to transgender rights advocates and policy reformers. Dean Spade and I, the guest editors of these special issues, believe that the articles we have included accomplish that goal very well. As a whole, these pieces examine a wide range of laws, rules, and practices that constitute the state’s efforts to maintain and reinforce gender norms, as well as the effects of those efforts and the particular strategies advocates have deployed for resisting them. For the most part, these articles are very much located in the urgency of the present moment, when the consequences for many of those whose gender identity or gender expression do not fit with the conventions of the gender binary can be severe. With this roundtable, however, we step back and consider the broader outlines of the activism—usually branded in LGBT communities and, increasingly, in the popular press as the transgender rights movement—that has challenged not only the state’s enforcement of the gender binary but also its power to do so. My coeditor and I were interested in eliciting a dialogue that contemplated this movement relationally: How does this movement articulate with other movements for social justice, such as antiracist work? Can it be framed in relation to analogous struggles for gender self-determination in locations outside the United States without merely exporting the Western notion of transgender? Have the notions that gender is also racialized, that racial categories are also enforced through gender norms, influenced the policy goals of the movement and, if so, how? How might the relationship between the movement’s past, its present, and its future be understood? Finally, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the relation between the newly emerging academic field of transgender studies and its central object of study—the challenges by gender-nonconforming people to traditional gender normativities. We thought it especially appropriate to consider this question here because the publication of the research presented in these two special issues of Sexuality Research & Social Policy marks a significant moment in the development of transgender studies. The last decade has witnessed the materialization of this interdisciplinary field with conferences, special issues of journals, and the publication of The Transgender Studies Reader (Stryker & Whittle, 2006) and Transgender Rights (Currah, Juang, & Minter, 2006). Despite these inroads, the place of transgender studies, especially work outside of the humanities that does not construct trans subjects as pathological, remains tenuous in academia. Indeed, one very significant facet of empirically grounded transgender studies, as is evident from the biographical statements of the authors of articles in these two special issues, is the site of its production. None of the articles in these two issues were produced by academics in tenure track positions at colleges or universities. Instead, some of the research we have featured has been produced by activists and advocates in the trenches who find time to write after they have put in their 40-plus hours of work every week. Other articles are by researchers temporarily based in grant-funded think tanks, by