Thinking Gender 2022: “Transgender Studies at the Intersections
The keynote event for Thinking Gender 2022: “Transgender Studies at the Intersections” follows a year in which trans visibility has reached unprecedented milestones in media. While famous transgender celebrities received accolades for their portrayals in film, 2021 also witnessed the highest reports ever of hate crimes against trans people, particularly Black trans women. As growing visibility has been attributed to social acceptance, transgender people find ourselves at the epicenter of not only a culture war that ridicules and debates our right to exist, but as targets of a nationwide, systemic political move to erase transness from existing and participating in public life in all its forms. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s bill seeking to classify trans youth access to medical care as “child abuse” is the latest in a barrage of 238 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country (half of which target transgender people specifically). These were introduced in the last year to incite moral trans panic and ensure political victories for conservative politicians.
Situated in this cultural and political debate on the validity of trans people comes the demand for intersectional research that elucidates on trans vulnerabilities in different sectors, such as education, public health, and the workplace. Public health and large nonprofit institutions have dominated this discourse, producing research highlighting trans people’s disproportionate rates of incarceration, homelessness, and substance use, all of which deprive trans people of life. Challenging a reductive and limiting understanding of transness, TG22 keynote speaker Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson asks, “Who is the Black and brown street queen, what kind of life did she lead, and what does she know outside of the projection of contemporary desires for resilience and resistance onto her?” Beyond the narrow confines of public health interests, we know little of Black and brown trans women outside the 30-minute survey study with $25 gift card incentives. While we are being glorified for our perpetual resilience, academia continues to restrict the production of research about transgender people that it does not consider marketable; particularly, research that falls outside the AIDS-industrial-complex.
Glorification of our resilience while restricting the production of humanizing research exposes the left’s meek and hollow resistance to right-wing national mobilization against trans life; it is mere tokenism and lip-service. Cis people present research about trans people at conferences and obtain recognition and status for this work. They are deemed “experts of trans studies” but their research does little to uplift street-connected trans people living in poverty. There is no empowerment in research that extracts our lived experiences without changing our material conditions such that we do not have to be brave or resilient. For assembly-line knowledge-producing research institutions, it seems that talking about oppression is more lucrative than ending it. Liberal and conservative institutions both partake in the reduction of trans lives as “discourse,” which they tokenize for politics, status, and profit. With this as the social and political backdrop, I am very excited to see trans lives discussed in a multi-dimensional way at the Thinking Gender 2022 keynote event.
Angel De Luna Escobedo is the Thinking Gender 2022 Conference Coordinator. She is in her second year as a master’s student in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with a concentration in social and economic justice. Escobedo has years of experience in grassroots and organizational advocacy for LGBTQ+, racial, and gender justice.
