>[!summary] Summary >This essay is in conversation with [["After Trans Studies" by Andrea Long Chu and Emmet Harsin Drager]] (2019). > >Trans studies, despite appearances of growth and institutionalization, has not fully materialized due to the precarious conditions under which trans scholars work. Instead of being over, trans studies is still in a formative state, shaped by economic and institutional challenges that demand new ways of engaging with and sustaining the field. # Abstract >In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu’s “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can’t be “over” because, in fact, it isn’t yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.” # Essay Body #### Introduction Trans studies, like trans people, is in a state of constantly being rediscovered. >Perhaps analogous to the way that trans people—our lives, our literatures, our activism—are iteratively “discovered” by the media, trans studies, with its institutional life, its laborers, and its literature, is iteratively discovered by academia, including by trans studies scholars themselves. As a result, trans studies is always just now arriving. >But given that the first seeds were sown decades ago, of course one might take a look at a field full of tiny tentative plants and see only weak growth. Maybe, then, it makes sense to declare the field a failure, leave it fallow. The "field" of trans studies has not happened yet because: - The contemporary university system presents systemic hurdles. - Trans knowledge laborers have been marginalized and often discarded. The lack of tenured trans studies faculty ensures institutional skepticism of trans studies. Instead, trans studies scholars occupy precarious academic positions: adjuncts, temporary lecturers, or grad students. Scholars must repeatedly discover there is more to trans studies than what their various gender studies or queer theory classes suggested. These challenges could serve as a catalyst for reimagining new ways of producing or valuing knowledge, carving out a unique space. >After all, if trans studies is not a project of making possible trans thought in, adjacent to, and hostile to the academy, then what are we all doing here? These works collectively interrogate the formation, challenges, and future directions of trans studies as a field, with an emphasis on its interdisciplinary nature: >Jay Prosser’s Second Skins (1998); Viviane Namaste’s Invisible Lives (2000); Susan Stryker’s “(De)Subjugating Knowledges” (2006a) and “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” (2006b); b. binaohan’s decolonizing trans/gender 101 (2014); Regina Kunzel’s “Flourishing of Transgender Studies” (2014); Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton’s “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/ Studies” (2017); Kai M. Green and Marquis Bey’s “Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet” (2017); Cáel Keegan’s “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* about Queer Studies Now?” (2020); and so on. The field imaginary (collective set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes) is a decidedly *white* trans studies. However, the authors hope to affirm the field's interdisciplinary nature. #### "After Trans Studies" In "After Trans Studies," Chu and Harsin Drager argue that trans studies has reached stagnation, lacking an identity distinct from queer theory, adhering to comforting dogmas, and marginalizing the experience of transsexuals, and therefore requires an overhaul. Ultimately, trans studies is "over" and must give up its commitments to antinormativity. >“After Trans Studies” is a conversation between Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager (2019) that rallies behind the self-defined polemic that “trans studies is over,” or at least approaching the crossroads of a necessary major overhaul (103–4). To set out this bold new path of trans studies after trans studies, or (dare we say) post-post-post-transsexual studies, Chu and Harsin Drager raise concerns that the current practice of trans studies lacks proper field definition and unacceptably constrains conversations about trans (and especially what they call “transsexual”) lives. > >Harsin Drager and Chu find that trans studies has failed to distinguish itself from queer theory, insofar as it lacks a distinct set of theories and prestigious theory battles to call its own. Chu, in particular, calls for the production of theory through strife, calling up a metaphor of field development as an elite battle, or “a small number of very good monographs that we can really yell at each other over” that cultivates real disagreement (104). Both authors insist this disagreement has been foreclosed because of dogmas within the field, dogmas that they do not ever really name but one of which implicitly might be something like “trans is a good \[read: politically radical] object.” That is, Harsin Drager and Chu agree that trans studies has served as a constraining “church” sacrificing rigorous inquiry to “warmed-over pieties,” in part by imposing a feel-good “gender affirming” approach, which, they argue, precludes potentially controversial claims about trans lives and bodies (104). >Further, Chu and Harsin Drager tie the failed development of trans studies to the continued inability of the field to address the figure of the transsexual and the conversations of transsexuals. In this account, the field’s capitulation to the methods of queer theory has decentered the transsexual and relegated her to the medicalized, problematic, backward shadow of true affirmative transgender progress (110). Trans studies’ apparent sacrifice of the transsexual to the demands of queer theory has led to a further silencing of everyday transsexual life beyond the demands of antinormative politics and theory, and has collapsed the ability to “speak candidly about our lives as transsexuals” (113). Candidness beyond trans studies’ enforced political optimism, by contrast, would enrich the field’s articulated critical trans affects by adding bitterness, satire, and disappointment to the mix (105–6). Ultimately, the authors conclude that trans studies is over, has been over for transsexuals since its beginnings, and must give up its attachments to antinormativity to be transformed into something other than a failed derivation of queer theory. #### Response to "After Trans Studies" The authors argue with some of Chu's and Harsin Drager's conclusions. However, they wanted to challenge some of their assumptions. Trans studies has developed unevenly across different academic environments. So it's nonsensical to say trans studies is "over" when, for many, they're still in "before." Chu and Harsin Drager have oversimplified the situation. The limitations of trans studies are less ideological and more so about who has the resources and support to contribute to the field. >Put bluntly, the “great failure” of trans studies is that we can’t all afford to write. The friction between different forms of transness has been the debate running through trans discourse for at least the last half-century: - Transsexuality that strives to embody the norm. - Forms that strive to expand what might be considered "normal." - Forms committed to antinormativity or nonnormativity. >it was not only Jay Prosser who warned us and continues to warn us about the subsumption of trans epistemologies to queer/poststructural feminist ones—so did Viviane Namaste (2000, 2009), C. Jacob Hale (1997, 1998), Trish Salah (2007, 2009), Henry Rubin (1998a), Talia Bettcher (2014), and every 1990s trans community newsletter (OK, OK, we exaggerate, a little). Vivian Namaste's work has critiqued queer theory for overshadowing the experience of transsexuals, especially those who are economically marginalized. Namaste critiques queer theory as imperialist and aligned with upper- and middle-class transgender politics. >Namaste considers queer theory a form of imperialism that decides whether other modes of life are properly queer, and hence liberatory rather than problematic, conveniently ignoring the ways its own practice often becomes a largely shallow enterprise. Salah (2013), argued that Sandy Stone's "posttranssexual manifesto" (1992) gave too much ground to Janice Raymond's anti-transsexual project. It was meant to push beyond the medicalized, binary conception of transsexuality. However, by embracing the more inclusive term "transgender," the unique struggles of transsexuals might have been dismissed. The theoretical approach to trans studies, as exemplified by Chu and Harsin Drager, overlooks the real, material needs of marginalized transsexual individuals. The conflation of trans studies with queer studies or sexuality studies has more to do with university hiring decisions and the university-as-market, where trans studies is commodified in the academic job market. #### An Alternative: An Intellectual Community of Care The authors push back against Chu and Harsin Drager's call more more intellectual conflict. Rather, the academic environment should be compassionate and supportive, given the harsh realities faced by many trans people. >given that trans studies inevitably unfolds within the context of a world in which trans people are overwhelmingly poor, discarded, fucked over and fucked up, regarded as unreliable narrators, and so on, why would we want our small corner of the small corner of/adjacent to the university to be a battleground rather than a shelter? The authors posit that rather than trans studies being ‘over,’ it has already established itself, at least insofar as trans studies has been a battle/field in the academy. >there is not yet a trans studies that has been able to organize itself around the sustenance and survival of trans life. As such, we must amend our own cheeky polemic—that trans studies has not yet happened, and thus cannot be over—to acknowledge that, precisely to the extent that trans work in the academy has been a battle/field, trans studies has already happened. There are three senses of the word "field": 1) battle field 2) field of play (e.g. sports) 3) a space of cultivation. We inherited a battle field, play (both pleasurable engagement and uncompensated activity) is where the humanities presently are, and cultivation is what we might aspire to be. >We desire a trans studies that yearns toward collaboration and solidarity, orientations that demand practices of care and communal cultivation. That is, we see the ideal trans studies as primarily a collective practice, not necessarily tethered to a telos of novel theory (although novel theory should certainly be welcome). We desire the creation of a space in which trans thought can unfold, in which trans students might learn ways to live as trans in the world, and in which disagreement occurs, but not for its own sake. The authors desire a move away from hero-scholars and towards an intellectual community of care and interdependency. Emphasizing care need not lead to a "fragile church of agreement." Rather, emphasizing care, especially as understood in disability studies, allows for genuine disagreement and the expression of negative emotions. Trans studies may require an abolitionist (i.e. radical re-envisioning) stance toward higher education. So, we must build an ethic of solidarity and continue to hold out hope as we try, again and again, to advance trans people. >It’s possible that there is no “trans studies” as a social and intellectual practice that doesn’t eventually require an abolitionist stance toward higher education. Therefore, it is critical that trans studies produces not the tools for career advancement but an ethic of solidarity, an orientation toward each other, even as it conserves our bitterness toward the conditions that harm or abandon us. ![[before-trans-studies.pdf]]