The Little Yellow Book; or, Does Trans Studies Care? Jules Gill-Peterson (bio) Among the legion of ignominies that greet the trans scholar today is the historical curiosity that the academic field of trans studies is "institutionalizing" at the same moment that the institution is in the throes of a death-spiral-becomenormal. This is no coincidence, of course. After decades of neoliberal scorched earth policy, the privatized and hollowed out university—which might be read as a bloated hedge fund or money-laundering operation, with institutions unabashedly tying tax-free real estate development to ballooning endowments—will save face, in part, by rebranding as trans-inclusive. Trans people, who have a historically foreclosed relationship to the formal labor market in places like the United States, will find an opening we cannot refuse, even as we wonder how the ruins of a promise made to others on the premise of our exclusion could ever grow anything good. I leave one job with inadequate health insurance and a refusal to compensate my unending service to the university's trans branding for another, with marginally better insurance, but whose medical school's history of violence against trans people like me will perhaps imagine itself transformed by my entry into the faculty. In the shuffle, I strain to imagine if I could ever work in the same city as my partner, who is a trans man of color and scholar. At the same time, an unprecedented cluster of tenure track jobs explicitly solicits scholars in trans studies—how strange that six is, today, a large number—and I wonder (though it is something admittedly more like paranoia and less like wonder) whether the job ads, in their expansive calls for Black + trans, or trans + decolonization + more, have not actually rigged the game just a little, calling upon scholars who do not exist in measurable numbers yet due to a structural lack of training and support. Meaning, in other words, that such universities might finally hire friendlier faces (perhaps disproportionately white and nonbinary) who can then certify that the institution has become properly intersectional because it employs they/them pronouns, without needing to materially change. In all this, I am forever haunted by my failed efforts, thus [End Page 133] far, to train other trans women of color as PhD students in hostile departments, schools, and campuses, feeling sometimes that perhaps it would be better to say no to such impossibilities in the first place, as harm reduction: to spare others the pain of being eaten alive in the name of symbolic inclusion and then discarded. If, as Robyn Wiegman (2021) recently suggested, there is a sore disconnect on the left between disinvesting in broken liberal institutions, which have been pushed beyond the brink, and the continued persistence of liberal political attachments or demands for repair that are wandering without institutional home, then trans studies is a case study par excellence. We might ask of the academy's tenuous invitation to trans people and trans work: what exactly do we want out of a place not built for us? What do we want to contribute to an institution that does harm in our names too, now? A signal text for wrestling with this moment might be what I want to affectionately call the little yellow book, for my hypothesis is that much of the anger, resentment, pain, and anguish animating trans people's relationship to the academy and trans studies today—which is to say, also, our relationship to one another—comes in the vertiginous disappointment that the university is not the right place for trans care. Yet the demand persists. Trans Care (Malatino 2020) asks after the impolitic enmeshment of our fervent desires for freedom or collective self-determination with the deep reservoir of negativity that often feels confused, in the moment, with the history of harms specific trans people unevenly inherit. While care has normatively been framed through the ideal of the family form (6), or in individualized nodes like psychotherapy and neoliberal self-care (2), Hil Malatino directs attention towards the wide web of relationality that care spans in durable practice. It matters not merely that trans people, who in the...
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